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?

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.

Internet Goes on Strike

http://sopastrike.com/strike/

One Stitch

I see injustice and suffering in the world and I want us to pull together and fix ALL THE THINGS. Some might think it’s foolish to continue to believe that we can do this. Some people might be overwhelmed by the bigness of the problems. But there are shining lights of hope all around us. Sparks that show how good we can be to each other. Knitters have awesome insight into the value of small actions. By doing one small thing (one loop, one stitch) over and over and over, eventually big things (blankets, sweaters, love, warmth, compassion) emerge.

The Yarn Harlot’s Knitters Without Borders is one of my favorite sparks (Knitters have super powers). There are other examples all around us. Please share your favorite sparks in the comments. The local high school here had a mixer between high-performing students and low-performing students as a way to break down those barriers and positively influence one another. An Islamic Cultural Center opened in New York this week with a portrait display that celebrates diversity and our shared humanity. People make beautiful things and help each other all the time.

What will be your one stitch, your one loop today?

The Wanderer

I am not ignoring the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. I thought I might try. But no. I am crying over every remembrance. Growling over exploitation. Railing at injustices. Wishing for better in this world. I am almost media saturated. Almost ready to turn off the feeds and contemplate in silence. I am thinking right now, mostly about going back into the classroom after 9/11. 

That was my favorite classroom. In an old building, a half-flight down from ground-level, two walls were lined with multi-paned windows that we could crank open to let in a cross breeze. When we opened the windows, the trees and grass and silent pathways made us feel like we were outside. I couldn’t stand up on the dais to lead a lecture that day. I sat in a desk with a full class. Only one or two people were absent. One of the absent women knew someone missing in the World Trade Center rubble. I ached for her. She returned to class only sporadically for the rest of the semester. Brittle and emotional, she crumbled with the passing weeks. Eventually she withdrew and I don’t know any more of her story. 

But that came later.

On that first morning, a few days after the attacks, I had a hard time leaving the original Micro-Sonar (he was fifteen months old). In the classroom, everyone was muted. I let anyone talk who wished to talk. Without judgement. We listened. When silence had settled on us for some time, I looked around and asked what we should do next. One student—he favored very fancy pens, I recall—suggested that he needed a break. He needed to talk about something else, anything else for a little while. A wave of agreement went around the room.

I climbed back on the platform, with the green chalkboard, and stood behind the podium, opening my copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1. The words freed us that day, for a few minutes. I don’t remember what we were reading. That early in the semester of a Brit Lit survey, we might still have been studying Anglo-Saxon poems. 

…The wise warrior must consider how ghostly it will be when all the wealth of this world stands waste, just as now here and there through this middle-earth wind-blown walls stand covered with frost-fall, storm-beaten dwellings. Wine-halls totter, the lord lies bereft of joy, all the company has fallen, bold men beside the wall. War took away some, bore them forth on their way; a bird carried one away over the deep sea; a wolf shared one with Death; another a man sad of face hid in an earth-pit….

From the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer”