Lucky White Girl

Spoken word: The terms of the debate.

There's something about calling yourself a Marxist or a Feminist that makes people's eyes turn red.  They immediately want to debate you.  They will win, they say.  You can just see them dancing around you like a boxer, "c'mon, c'mon, c'mon" they chant.  They want to debate you, they want to win, they want to beat you up (metaphorically, that is).  This is the new Cold War, you standing in for a less tangible, more threatening target.  And if you say no, it's because you're chicken, it's because you know you're gonna be the loser in this ring where they will set the terms of the debate because they know if they get you on the defensive they've already won.  And that's the point.  To win.  The point is not to honestly explore the ideas, even though they'll swear until they're blue in the face that it is, oh it is the point, they'll say they really just want to understand. 

Bullshit. 

The hardest lesson I've had to learn about life is that people don't always mean what they say.  And it's not even always because their motives are nefarious it's just because that's the way it is.  They might not even intend to.  They just do it.  They just say it and don't think about if it's really true or not.  It's supposed to be true and that becomes good enough.

Don't believe them.  They don't want to understand.  They want to win.  They don't question; they challenge.  They want to win.  They want to be right; they want to win.  They want you to say --convincingly, not sarcastically-- that oh, they've changed your mind, made you see the light, maybe you will have to reconsider.

And then they'll be super nice to you and invite you out to lunch. 

They will pay because they know they've won.  The red threat defeated once again.

My experience with landuse "management" and the lack thereof

I'm back.  I took a little hiatus there for awhile while I was exploring some new possibilities.  In truth I was moving out of my rented apartment in Gainesville and moving out to some land owned by a nonprofit organization I used to work with year ago.  My friend Bob is now the coordinator of the organization so he said I could come stay out here rent-free for the summer in exchange for helping them put in this year's vegetable garden so I said yes. 

Everything was great until this past weekend.  The organization occasionally lets other groups use the land for their events and so a group of about 100 people came out for a weekend festival.  There arose two issues of great concern.  The first involves gopher tortoises.  The group wanted to camp in the north field which we don't use very much.  It's just a big open field with a bit of pecan grove towards the back and is surrounded by woods on three sides.  Because we don't use it much there are no designated roads and because there are no designated roads people drove willy-nilly across it and parked anywhere.  Which would be fine if there weren't gopher tortoise burrows all over the place.  Gopher tortoises are threatened; their populations are in decline all over the southeast mostly due to loss of habitat.  It's illegal to intentionally harm a gopher tortoise.  They're a keystone species which means that many other species depend on them (and the burrows they make) for survival as well.  As soon as I realized what was happening we made signs and staked out the burrows so that people wouldn't drive over them but I was still concerned about the ecological damage we were allowing to happen.  I suggested two options: one, prohibit vehicles from that area completely.  They can still camp there but they'd have to walk to their campsite.  Or two, have designated roads and camp sites marked out so people don't just drive randomly over the field.  The first was objected to as being impractical; people *must* be able to drive to their campsite.  The second was objected to as creating 1.) an eyesore (who wants to look at a permanent campsite out there all the time; it's nice when it's just open field and 2.) it might create more damage to have a permanent campsite.  So in the end the best I could get was that we'd continue to mark off the burrows with orange tape every time the field is open for camping. 

The second issue is fire.  We are in a drought.  Our area is coded red for our drought number on the Keetch-Byram Drought Index (550-600).  There's currently a burn ban in effect.  But the group wanted to have their "sacred fire" and my friend Bob didn't want to tell them they couldn't so we watched as a 6 foot tall bonfire was created and I didn't sleep well either of the two nights they had it.  If I had it to do over again I would've put in an anonymous tip to the sheriff's office.  It was just too dangerous.  I checked with a park ranger and found out it's a felony to violate a burn ban and that the landowner --in this case the organization-- would be held liable.  So Bob risked not only the liability of the Coalition but also the lives of the people themselves who very well could've been trapped in here if the trees they were burning next to caught fire.  (There's a hundred people out here and only ONE way out; the chances that some people wouldn't make it are not negligible).  I asked them the first night if they could try to keep the fire small and they said they would but then they didn't do it so they obviously don't care much about whatever rules we might deem necessary.

I think it's not an unreasonable thing to request that the Coalition request that all groups using the land agree to abide by local laws and ordinances including and especially burn bans.  I think it also would not be unreasonable to request that the group agree to not drive their vehicles in the north field if they want to camp there.  But the coalition seems to have a laissez-faire policy when it comes to land management which means there is no land management.  Anything goes as long as it keeps the visitors happy.  The  priorities are: attracting visitors and guests first; protecting turtles and reducing wildfire risk and everything else second.   If I don't like the priorities, I can leave.

I think I will.

Some (more) thoughts on anger

This is a old post I never published.  I wrote it some months ago back when I was reading a lot of blogs and participating more in the blogosphere.  There were always these melodramatic disputes going on --I just got tired of it.  I have to admit I don't do that much anymore (read many blogs) and I'm a lot happier for it.  Like any community, the blogosphere can get insular and there can be a lot of in-fighting, angry accusations and tearful resignations and it all seems so important at the time but later it seems self-destructive... like a waste of energy that could be better used to fight other battles. I still check in on these blogs every now and then but I don't read them every day (and not surprisingly the last time I checked there was still drama going on).  But finding this post in the archives, I thought that while it's no longer relevant to whatever the issue was at the time, it does contain some good reflections on a difficult emotion.

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There's a lot of anger around these days.  My anger.  Other people's angers.  Some of the blogs I read are really angry.  And here is one of those complicated both are true at the same time things: anger can be righteous and justified and at the same time still be anger.   There are three aspects to this:

• I am not a good ally if I'm exhausted and brow-beaten and want to give up.

• I don't know if I want to be an ally to angry social movements.

• I don't believe I should have to choose between challenging oppression and love.

The first of those points is related to recognizing that anger is spiritually destructive.  It moves me further from God (other people*).  When I see it in myself or others I don't like it and I try to understand it.  I don't generally run away from it.  I don't want to say people shouldn't be angry.  But I do want to say sometimes I need to withdraw from it for awhile.  There is a difference between those two things; it is crucial that you see it.

The second is related to the idea that anger and hostility and violence are tools of the oppressor, not of the liberation movement.  In 1957, Adrienne Rich wrote a poem called The Knight, (a symbol for that which we fight against) and it ends with this question:

Who will unhorse this rider
and free him from between
the walls of iron, the emblems
crushing his chest with their weight?
Will they defeat him gently
or leave him hurled on the green,
his rags and wounds still hidden
under the great breastplate?

We agree that we must unhorse the rider; but we disagree on how. The methods do matter.  I believe that if we do it the second way ("leave him hurled on the green") then we've simply replaced one knight with another and there's some amount of justice in that but it's not a pure justice.  The system hasn't been changed, only the rulers of it have.  It's a superficial change and I can't get very enthusiastic about that.  It'd be like liking what the state of Israel is doing to the Palestinians because I hated what the state of Germany did to the Jews. I believe it's possible; I believe it's necessary for me to hate both.   I don't want to be a part of a movement that replaces one oppressor with another and calls that liberation.

The third is related to my belief that even though I have rarely encountered it in my own life, I know there is a third way.  I know that though it has been used disingenuously as an excuse in the past it is possible for a person to reject the path of anger and still challenge hegemony.  I know that my own privilege makes that choice more accessible for me than for other people, but I think I can be a good ally regardless.  I know this is possible because, though he died a long time before I was born, I know Martin Luther King Jr was an advocate of that third way and it can be done.  This, I truly believe.

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* I believe the opposite of Satre.  I think God (not hell) is other people and on the rare occasions I use the word God, this is usually what I mean.

Some thoughts on loving

I was born and grew up in a small north central Florida town.  A "small town" in this case means about 30 to 40,000 people.  To me back then it seemed like a backwater.  It's about two hours from where I live now.  For a more detailed description of my hometown, my childhood home and my love/hate relationship with my home-state of Florida, see this post from February 2005.

There are three things in my life that I would say I have a love/hate relationship with: Christianity (and/or Catholicism, specifically), my country (the US), and my family.  Before I go further let me clarify what I mean by the term.  I'm using it more for the diametric opposition it conveys rather than for the actual terms.  Hate is such a strong word.  It's more like, I love these things immensely but at the same time they also sometimes (often?) hurt me and disappoint me. 

I love the teachings of Jesus and liberation theology and the idea of being in communion with God and other people.  I hate Crusades, intolerance and religion used as an excuse for patriarchy.  I love the people of this country and "good old American values" such as hardwork, (the working class!  I love that term!) and rooting for the underdog.  I hate to see us, as a country, grow greedy and fearful, militarized and corporatized and employ an imperialistic foreign policy that crushes other countries and causes much pain and suffering around the world.  I love my parents and my sisters and my nephews and niece.  I hate to see money and material wealth become such a strong focus of their lives and feel we lost something when we left the middle class for a more opulent lifestyle. 

But I don't really hate any of these things/people.  I just feel sad for them, sometimes betrayed by them and often disappointed in them.  But there's no doubt in my mind that I still love them. 

And every now and then they do the opposite: they make me proud.  Catholic priests martyred themselves for the poor in Central America and pressure the US to stop teaching torture techniques in US Army training schools.  It was a US president who instituted the New Deal and created the first real social safety nets in this country.  And however muddled our motives might have been, we did fight the Nazis (at least the ones in Europe and Asia in the 1930s).  And it was my Dad who once or twice dressed up as Santa Claus and arrived with hundreds of presents for poor kids at a low-income day care center and once gave some kid who used to work for him a full scholarship to a university.  That's when I know what it feels like to not only love these things/people but also to be really and truly proud of them.  It's such an amazing feeling.

So I was just thinking about love and relationships and how great it is that as we grow older our concept of love gets more nuanced and more mature (hopefully) so that where it once seemed impossible to reconcile deeply held beliefs in peace and justice and nonviolence with our love for people who sometimes act less than peace-fully, very unjustly and often violently, now it seems possible that these things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. 

At some point I think we let go of that useless notion of deserving (what a useless concept! to imagine that we can decide who deserves what!  If the word dropped out of the English language altogether I think that in and of itself would be a revolution right there), we stop linking up love with desert and just let it go.  You don't love the world because it deserves to be loved.  You love the world because it's beautiful.  You love the world just because it is.  It has nothing to do with desert.

Which doesn't mean that we don't feel disappointed when our religions act intolerantly or our country acts like an imperiaist or our families act materialistic.  And it doesn't mean we shouldn't feel disappointed during those times.  It just means we never withdraw our love.  We speak out to the homophobic bishop, we protest aggressive foreign policies and we quietly and delicately reject, or decline to participate in, the materialism of our families, but we do all this out of love. 

To the extent that every so often in our lives, we can do these things in this way, well... I just think we will have arrived, even if temporarily at a truly mature, fully realized humanity.  I really do.  I don't think we stay in that place ever (or most of us don't anyway).  I think we just get lucky sometimes.  Or we practice and get better at it but for the most part I think its more of a temporary state of grace that we get blessed with every so often and it never lasts.  But it is possible.  And it is practicable.

Some thoughts on security

If I had to choose between being very poor or being very rich, though, I hope I would choose the former.

I was thinking about the insecurity of poverty and the false security of wealth.  When I think about being poor, sometimes I imagine what it would be like to be in the same situation as the homeless people I know here in my town.  I imagine being old and sick and not having access to medical care.  And that scares me. 

But then the most amazing thing happens.  I can't explain it but this is also what pulled me through when I was in Colombia.  When I was recently arrived in Colombia and was coping with living in such a violent city and living with so much fear and anxiety I had this dream.  I dreamt that everyone lived underground, like hobbits.  And as we went to visit the families that lived along the river each one had their home underground in a small dark cave.  They would invite us in and I was scared.  I have a certain tendency to claustrophobia and have had panic attacks in small dark places.  I didn't know what to do.  I was there to do a job that required me to visit people in their homes and here they all were living underground!  But then I had this realization: that was their home.  They lived there.  People lived like that in their hobbit holes every day.  And for some reason --for some inexplicable reason-- that was all I needed to know.  If they could do this --if this was part of the human experience-- well then of course I could do it too because I am also human!  I know it sounds silly but it was this realization that helped me go forward with something that terrified me.

And that's what I think now whenever I think of being elderly and poor and sick and dying on the street, in a darkened doorway or on a parkbench.  People do this.  This has been the human experience for millions.  This was life for them.  If they did it, I could do it too.  It's amazing but I really can face anything when I remember this.

So the point was that for this reason it's easier for me to choose the insecurity of poverty over the false security of wealth because insecurity connects me to the rest of humanity while the sense of security that comes from wealth (which is not real anyway) is all about separating me from the human experience.  It leads to isolation and despair. 

And also the realness of the insecurity of poverty, the honesty of it is helpful too.  It's honest about the nature of reality, the nature of the world, the nature of human kind.  The false security that wealth lends you is fragile.  It breaks so easily because it's not true.  And when it inevitably does eventually, it's easy to be devastated.  How can you feel really secure when that security is built on lies?  Only if you don't examine it very closely I think.  But then you still have the problem of how to cope when it breaks down.

interpersonal conflict resolution.

I have the flu. but I thought I'd write about a touchy situation that I got into today.  I'm glad to say that eventually with good communication (or half-way decent communication anyway) we smoothed it out and I think we understand each other now a bit more.  It was really a good exercise in conflict resolution.  I really think this is really a good skill to perfect.  I need more practice so I was grateful for this, however challenging it was, ya know?  I mean, it could've really been nasty if neither one of us had the will to reach out.  There were hurt feelings involved and you know how that is!

But it just emphasized to me again that most times it only takes one person to take that step, to go out on a limb to really change the interaction 180 degrees.  You have to be willing to be vulnerable, to use biblical language to "turn the other cheek".  It's amazing how well that works!  I swear sometimes I think this Jesus dude was a friggin' genius!  And it reminds me that a lot of common sayings are so off-base.  Another reason I hate platitudes (sometimes they're just wrong, ya know?): "it takes two to tango" as if one person alone can't make a difference.  You can!  You really can.  I really believe that with all my heart.

As much as our society tells us that other people are dangerous and irrational, I really believe the opposite.  Most people are reasonable, even when they appear to be most unreasonable.  That I think is the biggest challenge we face today, to realize that the most important thing is understanding things that seem incomprehensible to us.  Now, if you'll excuse me I have to go throw up, my head's going to explode.

Saying goodbye to a "radical aristocrat"

I just went to a memorial service this afternoon that did perfectly what rituals like these are supposed to do: tie us closer to each other, remind us that we are a community and that we are greater than the sum of our parts. 

And this person whose memorial service it was, was such an integral part of our community it doesn’t feel yet like she’s really truly gone.  She and her husband had such a style of their own -he says it was all her- but that style to me is captured in two words: they were “radical aristocrats”.  He hated that term ‘aristocrats’ but I like it.  I don’t mean that they were well off or that they were conspicuous over-consumers.  I mean that here were two people who dedicated their lives to progressive change in this country and radical politics were so integrated with who they were and how they lived their lives, and they accomplished so much and yet they also took time for good food, good wine, good conversation with old friends.  Old fashioned stuff like that.  They -she, especially- took time to watch what the birds were doing outside her window.  Noticed when the northern birds came down for the winter and when they left.  Took time to put their hands into the soil to grow things.  Took time to go downtown to see a foreign film, have a cup of coffee at the local café.  They --she-- both of them lived life well.

I can’t tell you how much I admire them for that.

They have this house -where the service was held- that makes you want to crawl up inside, pick one of the books that line the walls, lay on the sun-warmed pine wood floors, listen to the bob-whites lull and fall into another world.

They were old Florida radicals.

And now “they” are only one and that’s gonna be so hard to get used to.  They had that bond, ya know?  That kind of bond that, because I just saw the film last night, I’m gonna tell you was like Johnny Cash and June Carter.  It’s like here are these two souls having their human experience and they bump into each other and they just journey together from that point on, as the minister who presided said, to do the work of life together, as in Robert Frost's The Pasture.  It's this poem, though, that more reminds me of the two radical aristocrats; the intellectual lovers.  One of my favorites (I memorized it once a long time ago), Shakespeare's (16th?) sonnet:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.  Love is not love
which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken:
It is the star to every wander’ing bark*,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
    If this be error and upon me proved,
    I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

All the world knew how much they were in love, how they grew into each other like old oak trees. How awkward it is now for one to stand alone. 

Goodbye Nancy.  You lived so well.

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*boat.  think of navigating by the stars.

An overeducated peasant's view of Harry and Sally

I spent 5 hours today editing someone's footnotes about Latvian farming communities and one of their sources was Jonathan Frazen's The Corrections.  Don't know what THAT'S all about, but I made $50 doing it and I'm much more nearsighted than I was when I began. 

No, not really.  I'm okay.  I'm just tired of staring at a computer screen but I still have to do the footnotes tomorrow, which is good because I really need the money.  Then Monday I have to start my research for the trade law class.  Let's not even THINK about that.

Anyway, after the editing job Gil and I watched When Harry met Sally which was cute and funny and Woody Allenesque (the poster to the side, by the way, is in German, click on it to make it bigger) but also it was very... um, what do you call it when you say one gender is this and the other is the opposite?  The Women are from Mars thing?  Yeah, so it seemed very that to me [did you get that little joke there?  Click the link, you dope!] 

[ahem]  Anyway, all that is fine, really, I have no problem with it.  I think.  I'm just not like that.  I'm more like the guy sometimes.  And I guess that's the problem.  It's that when we have these very strict ideas about how men and women are, regardless of why [I say, deftly sidestepping the biological/cultural debate going on over at Hugo's], regardless of why they are different, I mean, just expecting them to be so different not because they're different people but because they're male and female I don't know, y'all.  That just seems ... silly.

Well, that's about all I have to say about that.  I'm listening variously to polka music and The Adventures of Guy Noir and it occurs to me that I besides Lucky White Girl, I could call myself an overeducated peasant.  And a failed writer.  How about a lucky overeducated failed peasant writer?  hmmmm..... overeducated peasant.  I like that. 

[TRIVIA:  There are actually four movies referenced in this post.  Can you find them all?] 

P.S. If they've made a movie of the Corrections, that doesn't count!

Growing up: Kids and money

Gil and I travelled to Smalltown USA to celebrate my dad's birthday this weekend.  It's a real nice drive between here and there.  All back roads through horse farms, pastures and woods.  I've biked it a coupla times which is really nice.  About 100 miles.  When Gil gets a bike I hope we can do it together.

So we're all sitting around the dinner table, my huge extended family, Gil and I, when my niece makes a racist comment.  Several racist comments actually.  My family can be pretty backwards sometimes. My niece is pretty crude.  The rest of my family might think those things but not say them anymore (I remember a time when they did), especially in front of me and I could tell that people were looking at me to see what I'd do when she said it.  I did nothing, except for not disguise the look of disgust on my face.  I continued eating my crab cake.  They know it was an ugly racist thing to say, they don't need me to get mad about it to know that.  I did nothing outwardly but inwardly I decided that it's official.  She may be my sister's kid but she's not a very nice person and I don't really like her.  She's this kind of young girl who's shallow and superficial and proud of it.  It's not a personality type I understand very much.  It's the kind of girl Abercrombie and Fitch were counting on to buy their stupid t-shirts that say things like "Who needs brains when you have these?" written across the chest.  (There's a great girlcott going on against A&F by the way for making these t-shirts and apparently it's been very successful).

In contrast, however, I have my cousin's kid who is slightly younger but infinitely smarter.  She just started college (on a scholarship).  She's the opposite.  She's just now got her driver's license, is not at all into money and is very, very smart.  I could see her being like the girl mentioned in the newsstory to the link above.  I hardly ever get to see her but I'd like to call her up and say hey, let's go out for coffee.  Her family used to live in the same town when I was a teenager and I'd see them all the time.  I loved hanging out with her and her mom and her little sister.  But then they moved away and I kinda lost touch.

It's a shame that someone so privileged as my niece would turn out to be such a horribly shallow, arrogant air-headed person.  She had so many advantages.  My cousin's kid had some of the same advantages but turned out so different.  Why is that?  Just luck?  Maybe.  But I think it has something to do with those advantages themselves.  I had a lot of advantages too growing up in a white, working class family on a farm, but not quite as many as my niece did (who grew up in a private, planned community and now is 22 years old and already owns her own condo that someone bought for her). 

Books saved me, I think, opening up worlds for me beyond the small culturally homogenous one my parents lived in, but I also think my parents socio-economic status had something to do with it.  Kids surrounded by excessive material wealth lack something.  It's harder for them to learn the good virtues like compassion, struggle and hard work.  Not impossible, just harder.  Much harder.  It's like putting a huge hurdle in front of your kid and expecting them to leap it.  We shouldn't be surprised when they can't.

Connections, both lost and found

So.  Here I am, having just watched a matinee in my living room on a rainy afternoon.  The last drops of water are dripping from the eaves after one of those brief and all-too-predictable summer thunderstorms.  The sun is beginning to come out and turn the water into steam rising up from the black asphalt of the street.  I open the curtains and the front door and press my nose against the screen.  Everything looks washed off and clean.

The movie was Lost in Translation.  If you haven't seen it, it's about a older man, a movie actor somewhat past his prime who is in Tokyo doing some commercials.  He meets another American, a young girl, in his hotel, who's there with her photographer husband and you wouldn't think these two would have much in common but they do.  They're both insomniacs, for one, and they keep meeting each other down in the hotel bar in the wee hours of the morning.  They're also both somewhat disillusioned with married life and I guess that's where it all starts.  They don't have an affair.  They just commiserate a bit and have fun and yeah, I guess kind of rejoice in finding someone else who's on the same page. 

Life is all about the connections.

I never even knew

I just found out that my former best friend, the one I used to not be able to go 2-3 days without seeing because we had so much to talk about all the time, the one who knew everything about me, the one who shared dreams and aspirations and fears and passions with me for several important years of my life, this former best friend is now divorced. 

Divorced.

And I never knew until tonight.

How does this happen?  This happens when you haven't been on speaking terms for over a year.  For reasons no one remembers exactly just that it had something to do with deep feelings of betrayal and broken promises.  I don't know exactly how this happens just that the fact that it does, the fact that someone you once were so intimate with is now a complete stranger, the fact that when you see them again it's just like you never knew them, the fact of such badly broken friendships leaves me deeply quiet and immensely sad.  It happens.  Here's a review of a book about such tragedy in human relationships.  The comfort lies only in knowing that it happens to everyone and there's no easy way to explain why or how two human beings can hurt each other so deeply.

She's divorced now.  And I never even knew.