I have been pretty quiet about the election lately. Part of that is because I just plain ran out of coping power and had to turn away from this election for a while to share my sanity. But part of my silence is the reason why I had to stop looking – because the things this election has uncovered about this country disgust me.
I should be celebrating tonight. I should be feeling genuine joy if, as I suspect, Hillary Clinton becomes the first woman to become president. And I’ll have things to say about that in time. I celebrated wildly when Obama was elected the first time – I was crowded in a bar with strangers watching the results, and was first in the place to learn that the press had just called the race for him. The place when silent for a moment when I shrieked “THEY CALLED IT!” and then erupted in screams and cheers and shouts. Five strangers hugged me. The bartender put disco music on the stereo, and a gang of us ran out onto the street where the party was going on outside too. My favorite sight was seeing two women who had each brought out huge American flags and were doing a spontaneous majorette routine in the middle of Myrtle Avenue while I was inside dancing to Earth, Wind and Fire at 12:30 am.
And there will be celebrating tonight too, as well there should be. But I will not be out on the street – at least, not without an ear cocked just in case. Because this election has uncovered, nurtured, and encouraged the ugliness in the hearts of the people who weren’t celebrating that night.
The thing that gave me the most hope about Obama’s acceptance speech that night was his commitment to working with his opponent’s supporters. “…to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.” And instead of listening, a lot of people went against him every single blessed step of the way.
The Trump campaign and the Clinton campaign are both having their election night events here in New York City. If Trump loses, these are not people I expect to go quietly. If Trump wins, even, these are not people I expect to celebrate calmly. I am well and truly worried about what is going to happen in this city once the results are called.
Which is keeping me from celebrating Hillary tonight. She could be president, but some of the citizens are hell-bent against that – and they’re going to make sure we all know it.
So, this blog is old enough to now have a baby sister.
I have been thinking more about wanting to get outside more often, explore more, get more into camping or hiking or checking out corners of the city. But what stopped me was the feeling that I didn’t know what I was doing. And it hit me finally – I can learn that.
Also, I felt like if I had someone else to watch learning, I wouldn’t feel quite so alone. So – I will BE that person for someone else, I hope.
And thus I am announcing – Outdoors, Woman! a second blog, devoted to my efforts at turning myself into a hikin’ and campin’ naturalist that I kind of secretly always wanted to be.
I’ll keep this blog too – that’s just going to be about the outdoors stuff, and this will be more for general life.
Admit it. We watched the debates for the trainwreck factor. Maybe we went into them hoping we’d learn something about each candidate’s plans, hoping that someone, sometime, would ask about serious policy issues. But only minutes into each debate, it became clear that we weren’t going to get that, and we all instead were watching to see our respective chosen candidates score hits on each other. It’s too late now for us to hear any of the candidates challenged in their respective positions. Granted, in the minds of many there is a clear winner; but there are still some questions we could and should have heard asked.
So here’s the questions I wish had been asked, and would have asked if the debates worked properly. And I have questions for all the candidates, too – not just Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, because I also believe that the third-party candidates should have a seat at the table and a platform to speak as well. And – everyone is gonna get challenged.
I will confine myself to four questions per candidate.
FOR JILL STEIN – CANDIDATE, GREEN PARTY
In your platform, you call for a democratization of the Federal Reserve as a check on the Banking system. How would such a plan guard against overly-frequent change to the Federal Reserve system, borne of the shifting perspectives of those doing the voting?
Can you also explain how your plan would guard against similar changes to public utilities, since you also all for democratically-run public banks and utilities?
Your platform also calls for a conversion to 100% Green Energy by 2030. How does your plan expedite that specific time frame, and does it include job retraining for the Americans who are currently in the fossil fuel industry?
Finally, you call for a “reject[ion] of gentrification as a model of economic development”. Can you clarify how much of gentrification you believe is intentional, as opposed to simple happenstance? Can such a policy truly be legislated?
FOR GARY JOHNSON – CANDIDATE, LIBERTARIAN PARTY
You have stated that the “free market” is capable of providing solutions to environmental issues. Can you clarify what has prevented the free market from enacting those solutions thus far, and what specific changes need to be brought to the free market in order to encourage such solutions?
At one point you are on record for calling for an end to the Federal Reserve altogether, but your platform does not mention such action. Can you expound upon your current position towards the Federal Reserve, and how your opinion seems to have changed so greatly?
You have stated that a “market-based approach” is best for regulating the health care industry. What measures would you use to ensure that those with pre-existing conditions, chronic health problems, or other serious health conditions would still be able to obtain affordable health care in a free market? What measures would you use to ensure that health care providers do not refuse service to someone on the basis of cost?
You have proposed introducing means testing into the Social Security system. What measures do you have in place to ensure the solvency of those who fail such a means test?
FOR HILLARY CLINTON – CANDIDATE, DEMOCRATIC PARTY
You are on record as having supported not only the War in Iraq, but also the war in Afghanistan, and the USA Patriot Act. Yet in 2007, you opposed the Iraq War Surge, and have gone on record that your initial decision on the war in Iraq was “a mistake”. Can you clarify whether you also feel your position on Afghanistan was a mistake, and why? Can you also explain how you might avoid such mistakes in the future, preferably before the country has invested financial and personal cost?
Can you explain your disagreement with the Glass-Steagal Act, which levied restrictions on the banking industry? Do you find that the banking industry is in need of regulation, and if so, which regulations would you enact?
Your energy policy does not rule out fracking altogether, but instead leaves such a choice in the hands of each locality. Under your administration, what protections would there be for those people on the “losing side” of a local decision to permit fracking, who are then negatively impacted by fracking activity in their town?
You defended your categorization of Edward Snowden as a lawbreaker by saying that he could have availed himself of protections afforded to whistleblowers instead. Can you expound upon what protections are in place in Snowden’s case, since many of the existing whistleblower protections do not seem to apply in his case?
FOR DONALD TRUMP – CANDIDATE, REPUBLICAN PARTY
One of the solutions you have offered for alleviating the national debt would be to “refinance” it, by buying back existing bonds at a discount. What exactly would you offer bondholders in exchange for a lower return on their investment?
When challenged on your use of Chinese steel, you responded that you were simply practicing “good business” and that if your opponent felt you should not have done so, that she should have stopped you. Does this therefore mean that you support government regulations on private businesses, and if so, what regulations would you enact?
You have offered a number of different statements on your position on the minimum wage. Can you clarify whether you support or oppose raising the minimum wage, and if so, to what figure?
You have stated that all refugees to the United States be subjected to “extreme vetting” to assess their entry qualification. Can you list the specific steps that you would take above and beyond the existing vetting that takes place as it is?
….And four questions for all candidates, just to see who can answer them –
What, in detail, is the function of the office of the President?
What powers does the Senate actually have?
What is the process by which a bill becomes a law, in detail?
Do you trust the current democratic process in this country, in and of itself? Do you see any areas in which we may improve the overall procedure?
Honestly, I have little to add to the sturm und drang around the release of Trump’s ugly tape. Others have said anything I could say about Trump better.
Instead, my thoughts go to how he got that far in the first place. As I’ve said, the problem isn’t that Trump is so….Trumpy, the problem is that he had enough support despite the Trump-ness. He had a not-insignificant number of people look at him, size him up, and say “Yes, that’s what I want. I’ll take it in orange.”
That is the problem we should be working to correct – the fact that so many people feel so strongly that they have been denied dignity, self-respect, compassion, and charity, that the leader they want – someone they identify with – is someone lacking all of these.
And you know, I kind of get it. They keep saying they want someone who will “tell it like it is.” They want someone who won’t smile and make promises like everyone else who’s promised them something only to take it away. Trump belittles lots of people – sometimes even the very people who support him – but he’s at least honest about his contempt. That honesty…sometimes can come as a relief.
And I know what I mean.
I was a target for bullies all through fourth and fifth grade. But not the kind of call-me-names, punch-me-at-recess kind of bullying – my classmates chose a much, much more insidious way to get to me. When we were out of earshot of the teachers, they would sidle up to me, big fake smiles on their faces (often barely disguising giggles) and with voices dripping with sarcasm, would praise me. “You’re my best friend, Kimmy,” they would hiss. “You’re so smart. I wanna be just like you.”
Their tone was absolutely unmistakeable, and they knew it. That was the whole point. Because I’d been taught that the way to respond to bullies was just to ignore them. When I asked what “ignore” meant, I was told “Just pretend they’re not there.” And so I would stand stock-still, eyes down on my book or the ground or whatever I was looking at, growing stiff while they circled me and giggled and hissed “you’re so pretty, Kimmy… you’re so smart….you’re my best friend….” For two straight years, the praise I got carried the double-meaning of mockery.It was a tactic that has left me deeply, deeply mistrustful of any praise I get. Even today, almost 40 years later, I second-guess any compliment I get – I hear the words, but I wait and analyze the tone behind them, trying to gauge whether they really mean it, or if it’s just like Donna and Greg and Tina and Nicole and Karen and Brian did way back then.
Because that’s a really subtle thing for an eight-year-old to be trying to work out in their head. Even though it was clear from their tone that they were teasing me, I would still wonder if I maybe was wrong? Did they mean what they said this time?….was I being too sensitive? Was it in my head? None of the teachers seem to be doing anything about it, was it me?….If any one of those kids had ever dropped that act and actually flat-out insulted me, though – twisted their faces into ugly grimaces and called me stupid or ugly – it would have come as a relief. Because there at long last would be no mistaking their intent – I wouldn’t have had to second-guess them. I would finally know exactly where I stood, and could move on from there.
There are people here who have been talked-down to, confounded with double-talk and broken promises and roadblocks to everything they were told they deserve in life. From the time they’ve been children they’re told that they live in the greatest country in the world, that they just need to go to school and work hard and they can do anything – but then the establishment telling them that turns around and tells them that oops, sorry, it’s just business, we need to shut down the factory your dad worked in. The establishment tells them that hard work gets good pay, but then turns around and tells them that $9.00 an hour is just fine for a minimum wage. The establishment tells them that the bravest among us will be rewarded if they sign up to serve and defend our country, but then the establishment turns around and dumps them when they get home from making their sacrifices. “You’re our best and brightest,” the establishment tells them, but then laughs and kicks them.
It is no wonder, to me, why Trump appeals to them – there is no subtext. They don’t have to second-guess whether he means what he says. He’s saying some ugly, ugly things, but he means them. They know where they stand with him.
The challenge will be to figure out how to stop people from feeling so shunned that they will turn to a leader simply because he’s honest. Not about his background – rather, Trump is doing as well as he’s doing because all the things he says he wants to do, he means them. And his followers are so bereft of security that even that small bit – that assurance that when he says he wants to throw people out of the country, he means it – is enough of a life raft that they’re flocking to him.
Today, the Internet is abuzz over a cheesy commercial produced by a Texas mattress store – the kind that lots of family-owned businesses produce prior to a national holiday, where some employees are pressed into playing George Washington and saying “I cannot tell a lie about chopping down our prices” or some such. But this time, the “holiday” which inspired the ad was the upcoming 15th anniversary of the September 11th Twin Towers attacks.
Really.
As I understand it, it aired somewhere in Texas, once, and half of Texas had a collective fit, complete with angry phone calls and Yelp reviews, uploadings of cell phone-recorded videos to Youtube with “omigod can you believe this” captions and the ensuing re-tweeting and facebook sharing everywhere. The owner of the store was quick to apologize, followed by pulling the ad – and then after a couple more hours of backlash, he announced he was closing the business entirely. So by now, the only thing left is the fact that at one time this existed, and the uneasy knowledge that yes, we have just now reached a “jumped the shark” moment on 9/11.
Those who know me, know that I was here in New York on September 11th of 2001. And yes, I was indeed initially offended when I heard about this ad. But that initial shock gave way to a sort of…resigned shrug. Because, to be honest, “people exploiting 9/11” is something I’ve been getting used to seeing for years now.
In the fifteen years since 2001, I have seen people use 9/11 to sell commemorative coins, t-shirts, ties, calendars and other tchochkes. There were vendors hawking shirts and bumper stickers from carts around Ground Zero within a year or two. There was commemorative wine in 2011. There was a sushi place in Arizona that featured a “Remembrance Roll“. When the 9/11 Museum opened two years ago, it drew flak for having a gift store; and to be fair, there was some demand for things like NYPD t-shirts to commemorate first responders. But people were less pleased with the commemorative cheese plate on offer (the museum quietly pulled that a week after the museum opened). People have been making a buck off of 9/11 from the beginning.
But, that exploitation I can actually swallow. There is another kind, which has been going on just as long, which I’ve found harder to forgive – the kind practiced by politicians, or even other citizens.
Every year, in the few days leading up to September 11th I start seeing an uptick in flags on people’s Twitter and Facebook pages. On the day itself Facebook is usually covered by flags, pictures of the Towers, and people posting the words “Never Forget” again and again and again and again and again. I once lost my temper at a snide comment the friend of a friend made about how it seemed like so “few” people remembered the day that year – why, she had gotten her kids up early and dressed them up in red, white, and blue and brought them to church, she hadn’t forgotten, unlike some people….I responded that I had been close enough to hear the impact of each plane as it hit the Towers, I saw the missing-persons flyers covering my neighborhood for a months, and for a solid two weeks I had to go about my business with a huge pillar of smoke looming to the south; and that trying to forget some of that was the only way I had been able to stay sane, thank you very much. …I think that is partly why my own Facebook feed is free of commemorative messages.
But I wasn’t spared from George W. Bush’s flag-bedecked ads during his 2004 re-election campaign, ads which actually used footage of a New York firefighter’s funeral. Or from his press rep retorting, when hearing criticism of the ads, that “I can understand why some Democrats not might want the American people to remember the great leadership and strength the president and First Lady Laura Bush brought to our country in the aftermath.” I also get a lot from Rudy Giuliani, whom a lot of New Yorkers were already sick of in the years before September 11th – since then, we’ve all been suffering with an extra fifteen years of him, talking about it so much that during his 2007 bid for the presidency, Joe Biden quipped that “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.” This year, Trump and Clinton have both mentioned their first-hand memories of the day – Trump as a New York mogul, and Clinton as a junior Senator.
But even here, I could swallow it if all that was happening were just “9/11 happened and we should be sad” mentions amid a sea of other political blather. But that’s usually not the case. Here’s a sampling of what I’ve seen in the past fifteen years:
A Florida state senator posting billboards with a photo of the burning Twin Towers, with the slogan “Please Don’t Vote Democrat”.
George W. Bush invoking 9/11 to defend a bill calling for oil drilling in the Arctic.
A US Senate challenger from Ohio plastering his campaign ad with a picture of the burning Twin Towers, that was later found to have been photoshopped for maxiumum impact.
George W. Bush invoking 9/11 to defend tax cuts to businesses.
Trump claiming before a rally in Alabama that in the hours after the attacks, he saw “thousands of people” gleefully “dancing” over the collapse of the Towers.
Congress using 9/11 to support the Patriot Act.
Pamela Geller, a conservative political activist, blanketing New York’s public transit with anti-Islamic ads, all of them prominently featuring a picture of the Twin Towers aflame.
Congressmen like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham all tweeting about the “brave first responders” to the Twin Tower attacks, but then trying to block the Zadroga Act, which would provide health care to those same first responders suffering from chronic illnesses caused by exposure to pollutants at the Ground Zero site.
George Bush invoking 9/11 to send us to war with Iraq.
So there are those who are exploiting memories of 9/11 to make a quick buck. But then there are also those who are exploiting what was the worst day of my life to wrest power for themselves, and in doing so, have made the nation sicker, meaner, and poorer.
So I kind of have a good excuse for why I haven’t posted in a couple weeks – I was in Paris.
This was the second time I’d been ever, and also was the second time this year. The first time was over New Years’, and fell so much in love with it that when my initial plans for July fell through and I was trying to think “where to”, I knew instantly where. I didn’t post in here – but over on Facebook there are gushing posts about chocolate tarts and black currant sorbet and watching the Bastille Day fireworks from my window and exploring Versailles and Monet’s garden and wandering in a sun-dappled park and buying way too much at a cooking shop and nearly eating fish roe because of a translation mishap and bursting into song whenever I saw reference to the Marquis du Lafayette.
On my last afternoon, I went to a little cafe alongside the Place des Vosges and just had a dish of ice cream while I sat and people watched. They brought it to me with a small wrapped cookie alongside. I ate the ice cream, but – as is my habit – I put the cookie in my purse, to save for later. I also went on a pilgrimage to the chocolatier Jacques Genin, where I bought one of their smallest boxes – it only held nine bonbons – and painstakingly selected my choices, the clerk forgiving my faltering French and carefully picking up “une des fraise….non, deux des fraise….et deux de la menthe….” in her white-gloved hands and placing them in the box. I also asked for four different pate de fruits which she carefully nudged into a small plastic bag. They tucked everything into a small thermal bag to protect it all from the heat, because I had a half-hour walk back to my AirBnB; but even though they warned me it wouldn’t last much longer than that, I still decided to save it for later.
On the plane ride home, I finally dug into my bag to retrieve the chocolates and the cookie. But those nine chocolates, nestled so carefully together, had started to melt. The pate de fruits were all sticking together. And as for the cookie – it had been a flaky thing, and had gotten so beat up in my bag that it was nothing more than a pile of flaky crumbs.
I realized I have a very, very bad habit of denying myself pleasure. I don’t think that’s what I’m doing – I save cookies and delay gratification because I think I’m being virtuous and careful; I may not have this option later, so let me save it for leaner times. But somehow I never get around to actually enjoying those delights until the cookie is broken, the chocolate is melted, or the chance has run out. Or I get something and then never use it, and it sits there, waiting for me to actually let myself enjoy it.
Part of this, I’m sure, is a fear of scarcity. I do get to travel, but that’s only because the rest of the time I live super-frugal; making all my own lunches, counting change to make the subway, calculating the exact best date that I can send my bills in the mail so that they won’t beat my paychecks. I can’t be as free-and-easy with my money as I’d like, and that means that the splurges have to be now and then. I can’t be frivolous, I think; these are investments, and I have to make them last.
But that doesn’t explain why I’m also that way with the things I get for free. Those cookies were free alongside the ice cream. I could have had them right away. I even already had more cookies at my flat that I was already going to have to bring home on the plane. And yet I put them in my purse, not letting myself enjoy them right away.
I thought about that a lot.
I met someone in Paris my first visit and saw him again this time. My…friend (sure, yeah, let’s call him that) is an almost stereotypical French romantic – rhapsodizing over wine, swooning over the ratatouille we had for our lunch, gushing about les fleurs in Monet’s garden and exhibits in les musees. At some point I joked about how much money I’d been spending on shopping, and on how indulgent I’d been at some of the patisseries; and he just chuckled. “But this is Paris,” he said. “You have to indulge!” Let yourself actually enjoy pleasure, is his watchword; spend money on yourself. Be good to yourself.
He showed me a recent indulgence he’d given himself – he’d selected five or six pictures he liked, famous photos or paintings, and copied the images from online and brought them to a print shop to have high-quality prints made, simply so he could hang them up in his apartment. He showed me each one, explaining why he liked each one and pointing out that he really wanted good quality prints and that this was the only way to get them. “I could not get them framed,” he added with a shrug, “so I will just make the frames.” I nodded – thinking that I was going to be doing something similar, but realizing that I was just going to hit up the color printer at work. Investing in good prints, I had to admit, would make a difference.
Letting myself enjoy pleasure will make a difference. I have to be frugal in my daily life, but there’s a difference between being frugal and feeling deprived. I have things I can use and enjoy. I get opportunities for pleasure all the time. But I don’t use them. If I used them, perhaps I would feel the sting of frugality less – and perhaps I would enjoy myself more. Because even though I squirrel away moments of joy, afraid that another one won’t come soon, they always do. The only way I miss out on moments of pleasure is by not experiencing them.
Everyone knows what “Carpe Diem” means; sieze the day, don’t let the opportunity slip by. But perhaps I need to focus on something a bit different; what I need to work on, I think, is siezing the joy.
The last time I was in any kind of political protest was in 2004.
I used to be a little more active – not hugely so, but I was in a few marches in the 90s and early 2000s; something about unemployment in ’92, an anti-war march in October of 2001, another couple more in 2003. In 2004, I joined the big march outside the GOP convention organized by the group United for Peace and Justice. Most news about that particular march noted that it was one of the biggest such marches ever; and that it was largely peaceful, except for one little thing. As Wikipedia notes:
“The only major incident during the march occurred when some individuals of unknown affiliations torched a large dragon float between Madison Square Garden and the Fox News building. The float turned into a huge fireball, and the march was halted until firefighters were able to clear the street of debris.”
As it just so happened, I was twenty feet away of that dragon float when they set the fire.
I was there with my friend Colin, who’d joined a loose group of fellow Green Party members. We’d all noticed the dragon float in the crowd as we’d been marching – it was a huge papier-mache sort of puppet thing, beautifully decorated, carried by a group of about 20 people dressed all in black. But it was one of a lot of other things we’d been looking at as we marched, and didn’t pay it much mind. The march had started down on 14th Street and we’d just made it all the way north to 34th, Colin and I making a point of looking for a news camera and hollering towards it as we passed. The crowd was thinning out just after the convention center; the route turned east and then continued back downtown at that point, but a number of people were dropping out. Colin and I had gotten separated from his friends and were discussing how to find them back at Union Square – the march’s end point – when we started smelling smoke.
I turned around and saw the flames leaping out of the crowd behind me about three or four stories high. “HOLY God,” I blurted out as Colin turned to look too. It was the dragon puppet we’d seen at the start of the march. A number of cops peeled away from the barriers and ran for the fire. People were all asking each other what happened. “They set it on fire!” one woman exclaimed, running past us, and I first thought she meant a counterdemonstrator attacking us. But Colin said he’d seen the people carrying the dragon suddenly crouch down and cover themselves over with a whole bunch of umbrellas and banners; “I figured they were up to something,” he said.
We were drifting around the corner, eyeing the crowd carefully. I looked back to the path ahead of us, and suddenly saw a flying wedge of cops in riot gear heading right towards us — while Colin, blissfully unaware, was looking back at the fireball and chanting, “THE ROOF! THE ROOF! THE ROOF IS ON FIRE!”
OH sweet JESUS.
“Okay – Colin?” I barked, grabbing his arm. “Colin? Come on. This way. NOW.” I tugged him away from the cops, further up the street. I let go once the cops passed us; then even more cops in riot gear started coming up through the crowd behind us, joined by the rest of the crowd finally breaking out of their daze and starting to stampede away to safety. I started a run-walk up the street myself, wanting to get out of the way but not wanting to lose sight of Colin either, and finally broke and ran myself. Someone ran past me hollering, “The edge! Head for the edge!” and I took his advice and moved towards the sidewalk (even in the midst of my panic, I was gibbering “pardon me, excuse me” to people as I passed them). I slipped through a gap in the barricades just under one of the awnings for Macys and huddled there with three other strangers, catching my breath. I waved Colin over when I saw him again, walking calmly but briskly away from the chaos; he chided me a bit for running, but then apologized when I saw how freaked out I was.
We waited there a moment longer until we saw a crowd of at least 20 people heading back towards the cops, legal-aid advisors in green baseball hats and marchers with black bandannas covering their mouths and noses. A team of riot cops was heading up the street towards them, another couple of black-bandanna’d marchers running alongside and catcalling them. Behind them, another team of cops was repositioning the barricades to bar the rest of the crowd from moving onto the block. Colin had already started shepherding us up the street as the two groups met in the middle of the block, and then further on again as team of mounted officers suddenly swept into the intersection behind us, shutting police barriers behind them with a clang. A couple of Colin’s friends found us at that point, and we completed our share of the march together, the five of us walking down an eerily-deserted stretch of Fifth Avenue as the police held everyone back behind us. Colin had proposed getting ice cream after the march, but I left as soon as we got to the park, heading straight for home – staring up at a quote by Yeats on the bus:
“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”
—
I did not join any march of any kind after that. I’d been invited to – Colin asked me along to several – and there were several causes I supported which held them. But I’ve always bowed out, and if pressed, I always explained that this was why. Starting a bonfire in the middle of a huge crowd of people is a tremendously stupid and fucking dangerous thing to do. I’d rather keep myself safe, thanks, and since protests are clearly going to draw the kind of people who do think torching dragon puppets in the middle of crowds is actually a good idea, the best thing would therefore be for me to keep myself away from protests. QED. I once got a scolding from someone who said that they’d heard about the incident and that it was a police-operative undercover double-cross sort of thing; I didn’t care, I said, because who did it, and for what cause they did it, didn’t so much matter as that they did it.
So at first when I saw a march was starting up tonight, in support of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, my initial reaction was to think “good, but I’ll sit it out.” Best to go home and stay away from an unsafe place. And then it hit me that – I have the luxury of having safe places. Sterling probably thought he was safe where he worked, and Castile probably thought that his own car, with his wife and child, was also a safe place.
Or maybe they didn’t. My workplace and my car would be safe places for me – but they weren’t safe for them. My “safeness” is only due to the color of my own skin. My sitting out the march tonight is only going to underscore the fact that I have the privilege of having a safe place inside my skin, whereas Sterling and Castile – and Treyvon Martin, and Mike Brown, and so many others – have no safe place.
So I’m going to be joining the march tonight. It might be dangerous, but not as dangerous as it was for Alton and Philando to be black men in the United States. I can’t not be there.
About 18 years ago now, my Irish friend came to visit me for the first time. I’d visited her before, and this was the first time she’d come to see me. It was also the first time she’d visited the United States. She spent a lot of the first few days staring at everything with wide-eyed wonder, remarking on actually seeing something in real life that she’d seen on television (there was one point when she was trying to hang out of a subway window so she could take a picture of Queens, because “it looks like like Archie Bunker!”), or just staring in mute, dazed paralysis. A few days into the trip, while we were in the cafe for a museum, she gave me a pensive look. “So tell me,” she asked. “What…what is America?”
I think I actually stopped mid-chew. “Well, it’s….it’s a country….”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” She explained that she had a handle on what constituted the Irish cultural identity. Other countries, too, had their own definite cultural identities – there was something you could point to and say that “that is typically German” or “that is typically Irish”, or French or Italian or Japanese or what have you. But the American identity had her confused. So what was it?
I was still sitting there mid-chew, thinking. “…I have no idea,” I finally admitted. And after 18 years, I still have no idea how to answer that.
But thinking about that question every year has become a major part of how I observe Independence Day. One year I went to Washington DC and thought about it as I paced my way around the Mall just after dawn, contemplating Lincoln’s and Jefferson’s memorials; another year I was in a small town in the Adirondacks, huddled between a young family and a gang of Hells’ Angels watching the fireworks. Most years I grab one of my collection of American history books and read, and think. And I am no closer to having the answer.
This year, though, I realized why I don’t have a single answer – it’s because ever since its founding, the definition of “what is American” has been changing.
At the time of its founding, the United States was a conglomerate of former English colonies who basically just wanted to be left alone to do things their own way. Culturally, though, we were still pretty close to being English. But soon the new citizens began to ask themselves “what is America” and went through an identity crisis of sorts – right about the time that a vast frontier opened up for us. Novelists and painters and playwrights started writing about America’s earlier colonial days, setting the stage for the Honest Plainspoken American as our national standard. The plainspoken, hardscrabble pioneers moving out to the new lands to the west weren’t people seeking a particular lifestyle, they were Honoring Our American Roots. The simple homespun ways of the pioneers weren’t because of a dearth of goods, they were because Americans eschewed the trappings of artifice. Even the huge meals that working farmers had to eat were signs of Real Amerian Appetite.
But almost immediately that definition had to change, because there were a couple towns already in that frontier. Towns where the founders hadn’t been English – but French. New Orleans, along with Baton Rouge and Natchitoches and all the little Cajun regions scattered along the Mississippi, had to count as American now too. And so did St. Louis, and Chicago. And in time, so did towns founded by Spanish settlers – first in Florida, then in Texas, then some bits as far west as California.
And then it changed again as immigrants from even more countries came to find their fortune. Germans and Scandinavians to the northern Plains, Chinese to California, Irish everywhere.
And then the definition had to change again, to accomodate a swell of newly-fledged citizens who’d formerly been enslaved. They looked different, they thought different, the circumstances of their coming had been very different indeed. It took longer in this instance, but the African-American experience got woven into the definition of America.
And then it expanded again, to include women. Not that we weren’t here all along – but our roles had become limited. More limited, in a way, than they’d been when we were colonists, when shutting out 50% of the minds and strength of the population would have been foolish. Over time, the definition of American evovled to exclude us – but then it evolved yet again, to include us once again. There is still a ways to go here, too, but at least we are inclued in the count.
And we also had to rewrite the definition again to put back the faces and voices we had tried to erase – in our rush to colonize the new land, we didn’t always consider whether it really was new, or available for colonization.
In time we also had to expand our definition to include other faiths as well – we’d always said we valued religious freedom, but it still took time for the country to accept a Catholic president. Or a patriotic song by a Jewish musician. Or a Muslim athlete.
With every shift in definition, though, there are those who want to stop it. The shooting in Orlando came just one week before Stonewall’s inclusion on the national registry. The KKK still rail against Jews and African-Americans; for many, “feminist” is still a dirty word. Trump still talks of excluding Syrians and Mexicans from our country, despite being the grandson of a man who was kicked out of Germany for being a draft dodger. But even this is par for the course – the Know Nothings were fighting German immigration at about the time Trump’s grandfather was moving over from Germany in the first place.
Fighting to stop change is the wrong idea. This country is too big, too varied, too chaotic for there to be only one definition of “America”, and the Founding Fathers most likely knew that would be the case. The country was painted in broad strokes, with a working definition hastily pencilled in, to give us today the leave to shift and morph and adapt the country into whatever we needed it to be, given the current state of the world. When the world needed scientific innovators, we could be that. When the world needs artists, we gave them that. The world may not have needed more imperialists, but we became that too. We have been drivers of scientific progress, influencers of geopolitics, crusaders, buffoons, beacons of hope, dictators; a sign of all that is wrong with the world, and a sign of lots of things that are right.
As I write this, one of the best-selling musicals on Broadway is the story of one of the Founding Fathers. Two hundred and forty years ago, those men – along with most “Americans” – were white. Today, though, the cast of Hamilton is deliberately mostly non-white – to reflect the faces of the country as it is today. And the music isn’t the classical minuets and English folk songs of Hamilton’s day – it’s hip-hop. And it wouldn’t have happened if the definition of America hadn’t expanded to include everything that’s come along within the intervening 240 years.
The answer to “what is America” is never going to be set. It is always going to be a working draft, as pieces get written out, added back, expanded, rewritten, rethought, refined, redrafted, reworked. America is an experiment and we don’t know what it’s about yet.
And so our best work and most patriotic act would be to keep looking for how to expand the country, who to include. Rather than writing someone out for being the wrong race or color or creed or gender, rather than turning away those who vote Red State or Blue, we need to write them into the definition of who we are, and keep moving forward into the next change.
I am a gut-level fan of the Waterboys song “Fisherman’s Blues“. It’s almost trite for someone who’s an Irish folkie to like this song, but I don’t care. I know even the opening notes by heart – Mike Scott’s chugging guitar, the first chiming mandolin chord, the first wheeze of the fiddle – and even just that is enough to make me smile. Play the whole thing and I usually end up tapping a foot, swaying slightly and singing along, happily sighing when the fiddle wraps around the mandolin during the bridge. By the second verse I’m usually singing – “…with light in my head, and you in my arms….WOO-HOO-HOO!” And sometimes, during the second bridge, when the drum and fiddle are twirling around each other I get out of my own seat and twirl around with them, totally caught up in it.
*
I’ve been wanting to write about a lot of the events of the past few days. But I just felt too helpless.
First the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. Forty-nine young people, dancing just as joyfully – albeit to other music – all of them shot by a madman, for no other reason than being men who loved other men. Or women who loved other women. Or for just being in the same room as men who loved other men.
The media and the news have gone off on a wild tangent about this being a terrorist act, simply because that madman (I refuse to type his name) called 911 midway and offhandedly said he was with ISIS. But this was no terrorist attack – he was simply shooting people he hated, people who were going about their own lives and trying to carve a little joy out for themselves, joy that had had absolutely no impact on him and wouldn’t have interfered with his own life in any way.
He hated them because they loved, and he killed them.
And every time I tried to think of how to write about that, nothing I thought to say seemed to matter a damn bit. So I stopped.
*
And then a few days later, prompted by the attacks, one of Connecticut’s senators started a filibuster demanding a vote to regulate guns.
I first caught news of it at work – I have a BBC news app on my iPad, and my coworkers and I usually stop our work and huddle around it when we hear its distinctive musical breaking-news alert; my co-worker N once teased that “whenever I hear that, it’s usually because something bad happened.” The filibuster, though, we thought was good – hopeful that maybe something would finally bring the steamrolling of guns over this country to a halt.
I watched the live feed of the filibuster off and on through the day, into the night – thinking of something to say about guns. Thinking of how the one and only time I ever saw anyone in my family hold a real weapon, it was when my father borrowed my grandfather’s little hand pistol to shoot a huge snapping turtle in the pond where my brother and I sometimes swam. I was about nine, and had no idea Grandpa owned it or that Dad knew how to shoot it. Dad made us kids stand about ten feet away and we all huddled, jittery, as Dad took aim into the water and fired once, then twice. I jumped both times even though I knew it was coming. I don’t remember going back in the water that day.
I also thought about the stage combat class I took in college – how every other class was hands-on, and all of us gleefully dove in and learned how to do fake punches and brandished fencing foils and flung each other through scores of stunt wrestling moves, but the one class that dealt with gun safety was uncharacteristically hands-off. The instructor asked us all to simply come in and sit down, and then proceeded to disassemble a starter’s pistol he had in front of us – telling us exactly what each and every part did and how it worked. And then he put it back together again, telling us exactly what each and every part could do if it went wrong. He loaded a single cap into the gun, pointed it at the ceiling and fired – explaining what the entire ballistics process was as he did – and then spent the rest of the class running down a long list of actors who had been injured or killed from guns, even prop guns, and explaining exactly what had killed them and what they should have watched for and what they did wrong. To this day, I have absolutely no problem holding any other weapon – I’ll probably even quote Inigo Montoya if you give me a rapier – but I will only touch a gun under extreme duress, and most likely will try to find a way to not have to.
I don’t dislike people who do like guns, mind you. Remember, my grandfather owned a gun, and my father knew how to use it. I know at least one or two other friends who’ve tried target shooting and hunting. But I also know that they also know how dangerous they are, and they’ve simply chosen to use caution around guns – while I’ve just chosen to abstain from the whole thing, thanks. I also know that they know it makes much more sense to pick the safest possible gun for the job, rather than trying to collect a military-grade weapon just for the sake of having it. And they agree with me that having some system in place to ensure that people buying a gun aren’t criminally dangerous is also an important thing we should be doing to protect ourselves.
I thought of all this while the filibuster was going on, and was getting ready to write something the next day – but then the Senate brought up four gun bills in a row, and voted them all down just as quickly, and I was too disenheartened.
And then a few days later, Representative John Lewis held a sit-in in the House on the same issue – but even then, after fifteen hours, all that happened was that Speaker Paul Ryan adjourned, and nothing happened. And I was even more disenheartened.
*
And then this morning that chime rang on my iPad again, and this time it was telling me that the United Kingdom had voted to leave the European Union.
In and of itself that shouldn’t seem to matter to someone in the United States. The Dow plunged at first, but then righted itself midway through the day; the talking-heads were all talking about how this was a non-binding referendum, and Parliament still had to vote on it and might say no; and it was England so who cared anyway.
But mixed in with that I heard other accounts, from non-White Britons who were already starting to hear people shouting at them to “go home”. I was hearing from people who’d voted to leave defending themselves by talking about how “immigrants” were taking their jobs. I was hearing about people in their 20’s who were on the dole and had been getting ready to retrain for a different career in Germany or France, but now wouldn’t be able to. I did perk up mid-day, while reading the truly baroque insults that various Scots had been hurling at Donald Trump for an ill-advised tweet, but then I read yet another account of a Welsh woman in a hijab being told to “go back home” and whatever little good mood I had shrivled.
I came home, not wanting to talk, not wanting to write, not wanting to think. Websurf, dinner, read, bed. That was going to be it. A puppeteer I know posted a quirky question on Facebook which caught my eye – “What do you all need to hear today?” – and I read some of the responses; some serious, but some silly (he responded to someone’s request for “Hamilton” by posting a link to an audiobook of the Federalist Papers). I left my own lighthearted answer – three tongue-in-cheek music requests, things I thought would either be difficult to find or fantasy pairings I didn’t think existed; a rare Tom Waits bootleg, a remix of a specific Peter Gabriel song, and – “a recording of The Waterboys jamming with Glen Hansard on ‘Fisherman’s Blues’.” I chuckled and made dinner.
Less than an hour later, something made me check Facebook again. My friend had responded to my comment, saying: “you mean this?”
And he also had posted this video.
I stared. I watched it. I typed a babbly all-caps response that I HAD TOTALLY MADE THAT UP HOW DID YOU FIND THIS AND WHY DID YOU NOT TELL ME YOU WERE A WIZARD. I watched it again. And again. And again.
And by the third or fourth viewing the song was working its usual magic and I was singing along, the heart back in me and wanting to write something.
*
The world can seem bleak sometimes. The Things Going Wrong can pile on you unrelentingly, and you feel like your only options are to swing from anger at the injustice and a feeling you should be fighting, to sadness that there are so many for whom your work will be coming too late, to helplessness because the problems are all so big and the struggle so long…
And that is the time you need to stop and take a step back and do what you can to find joy. Slip into a coffeehouse for a croissant. Visit the bodega where they have a friendly cat. Let a neighbor’s dog lick your face. Point a rainbow out to your roommate. Trade silly jokes with your co-workers. Discover a friend might be supernaturally able to manifest Youtube clips. Dance in a club with friends, or dance in your apartment by yourself, singing along to the Waterboys or whoever gets you dancing, and stay there and dance as long as you need to until you’ve remembered what the fight is for, and can get back up and fight again.
“I know I will be loosened from the bonds that hold me fast,The chains all around me will fall away at last…” – Mike Scott, Fisherman’s Blues
WadsWords 