Some in the media are calling tonight a “Republican landslide” and asking whether Democrats will “hear the voice of the people” - a voice theoretically calling them to turn their backs on and harden their hearts against those very same people? It makes no sense.
A small group of ruthlessly wealthy people spending unprecedented piles of money to confuse and inflame and distort the minds and hearts of millions of other, more normal people, does not a mandate make.
I don’t honestly believe that our fellow so-called average Americans don’t want their neighbors, children, or elders to have medicine, food and shelter. I don’t believe that the same so-called average Americans are “angry with Obamacare” (angry with being cared for?)… in part, because I highly doubt that the average American has any real sense of what their own current or any new and forthcoming health care policies are or will provide or deny.
Instead, what many Americans have been fed is a persistent diet of fear, conflated with rage. I borrow from what my Irish American mother calls the potato theory ~ as in potato famine. Media is being used to work folks into a frenzy of fear. They believe, because they have had the idea drilled into their minds and bodies 24/7, that there are not enough potatoes to go around. They are told in constant imagery and soundbites that if they do not rabidly attack other people - if they are foolish enough to share and trust - they will themselves starve.
They hate because they fear. But that’s not the same as wanting your neighbor to suffer. It’s a panic mode. And panic isn’t a mandate.
When I was growing up, it was the Russians we were taught to panic over. If we didn’t build our military, build bigger, better (?) bombs, then the Soviets would come and wipe us all away. Before then it was the Japanese, now it’s the Chinese, Mexicans, and Muslims. Someone is going to steal from us. Someone is going to take our livelihood, our home, our safety.
And that is true. Someone(s) is taking our livelihood, our homes, our safety - clean water, air to breathe, food to eat. But it’s not the Russians, Chinese, Mexicans or Muslims. It’s a tiny group of people who are literally enslaving and imprisoning vast numbers of “average” Americans. It is a tiny group of people who have so much material wealth - such a disproportionate ownership of our common lands - that they can, for example, spend $142 million dollars of personal funds on a campaign.
Election season both intrigues and repels me. I am inspired when I see people coming together and caring. I am repelled by the creepy, insidious attitudes of wealth and power, by the knowledge that many people are playing very nastily, and by the bizarre rewrites of reality. I want that awfulness to be over, for elections to be a different beast entirely.
Tonight, I voted for some candidates who delight me, people I am genuinely glad to see on the street. I voted for some candidates who do a good job, whose work I can count on even if I wouldn’t necessarily want them over for tea. I voted for some candidates who caused to me grimace, but are better than the alternatives. Some of these people will “win” the job in question. Some won’t.
But if this is our country, our place, our world, then it both does and it doesn’t matter who won tonight. Because we all have to keep working at bettering it, regardless. Not just politics, not just candidacies… but life. This is all about life, after all, right? Not about some theoretically bloodless competition, some footballish brain-squashing political hunger game?
And because this is life, I want to keep shifting the world so that the things that delight me - which absolutely include caring for elders, children, and neighbors; the things that make me pleased to be a human - most of all, when I see an unassailable presence of compassion; that these will be the space and the heart my fellow leaders and followers are striving for too. So that increasingly, it’s not a vote of this against that, or these against those, but a moment to consider who is best suited to carry out the charge of humanity in each of our communities at a given space in time.
I want elections to be nothing about fear, or rage, or hatred. I want us to be intelligent enough that we can’t be spun to attack each other… that we can’t be spun away from the field in which there is plenty of food growing, be told to look instead at a cold wall and believe that there is too little here… that we can’t be spun out of reality, so that we scrabble against each other on the cement while the whole verdant world is there, having our back, if we just turn around.
I want our leaders across the board to be people who are seeking to grow our garden, for everyone. I want the only spinning we do to be in celebration.
In the meantime, I am and will be grateful for those people whom I believe are carrying that charge of humanity and compassion, and who are strong-willed and resilient enough to bring that into the current, difficult, cement-scrabbling political discourse. Thank you. Let’s all join that party together? There is room for everyone.
]]>Could it be the old Creamery? So much happens in that singular, quirky, tumbledown block. We have music and theater: Shoshanna’s Redwood Raks, North Coast Ballet, David & Jackie’s Arcata Playhouse. We have Noelle at Phoenix Arts with her fabulous clay selection. We have Sunfrost Refrigerators, Humboldt Bay Housing Corporation, a furniture storehouse, and even some apartments. We have barbed wire, burned out toe shoes, and Alma’s Tacos. Is any other square footage in the city so thick in its diversity and craftiness? And yet, stillness abounds the grounds. So much within. So much quiet without.
Northeast… ballet on the wire
Preventing entry into decay
The old fire door
Eastside flowers
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We bought a few handfuls of these goblet stems sans the actual drinking bowls, today at the annual Fire & Light seconds sale. Not sure what exactly we will do with them… but it will be pretty.
Bryn was delighted to see our friends April & Ron - always a source of good cheer and humor. If April were a kind of tableware, it would be Fire and Light, indeed… maybe that new Holiday Green?
After rain, seeping into pieces
Petals pearled
Middle aged pollen makers
Inside the open
Budding belle
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A Flatmo in the making: the new Outdoor Store (complete with sketchy white fella, whom Duane assured us will be filled in soon - hmm, maybe he left him blank for Dead White Invaders Day?).
A quiet moment, courtesy of Thao Le Khac, at the Arcata Exchange. You know the store is refined when even their back entrances are inviting.
White paint opposing the peace of Thao’s chair. At least it’s better than the forestland dumps, but wasn’t there another use for all that glow?
]]>So, who knows where this is? I’m calling it All Buttoned Up. Of late, Bryn’s fascinated by robots (and appliances, thanks to Thomas Disch’s Brave New Toaster), so I’m coming to see metal, rivets, and rust with new implications.
Juliet’s window
Many starry hands
Redbricks lick from gravel to gable Salt slicked air ghosts on broadwalks new Window lips breathe through slats’ shuttered light In the dark Bay’s hushing evening hours ~ Eureka, Friday 8 October 2010
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The posts from raildays past leak and rot, yet they are beautiful.
Finger snugglers
Bryn
]]>In the summer after sixth grade, I had my first - and last - childhood crush on a girl. I was at Gordonwood, an Episcopal youth camp in mid-Michigan. She was one of my counselors - a tall, feisty, braces-toothed teenager. I was struck by one of those rare moments of pure clarity: I knew I was attracted, I knew I couldn’t be attracted, I knew that socially and psychologically that was an emotion I could not afford. And so, even though by most reckonings I too was an expressive, opinionated preteen - accustomed to standing up for myself - in the course of one afternoon (whose light I could paint for you now, it is so clear) I completely squelched a significant portion of who I could become.
Years later, in high school, I had a good (straight) friend who was determined to cure me of homophobia. She went about this in any number of ways - the savviest being an introduction to the Darkover series by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I couldn’t read Thendara House and not root for the women lovers. But, I still argued, that was fiction, not life.
When this good friend’s boyfriend, asked me what I would do if I thought I were a lesbian, I answered frankly. I would kill myself. I wasn’t exaggerating. I wasn’t being dramatic (thespian though I was). I meant what I said. That was a terminal point in my imagination.
Even though I was surrounded in the diocesan church community by people who espoused fairness and tolerance, I knew that the majority of my world - my school, neighbors, home congregation - would not have permitted me to be attracted to other girls. I would have paid even more dearly than I already did for being an outspoken feminist, a thinking person. To wear “gay” on my back would have been a target too large to escape in the stifling suburb in which I lived.
I graduated from high school early, had seven months away from school. I turned eighteen in August, just before college. And suddenly, I knew it was getting better. Over just a few weeks, I went from telling a close friend that I would be a lesbian if I could, to having my first crush on a fellow female student. It wasn’t easy, I won’t pretend. Having come out, I wasn’t going into any more boxes. I was attracted to men, I was attracted to women. Being bisexual in the late 80s meant that everyone suspected you. Lesbian feminists said we betrayed women if we dated men. Men wondered if we would leave them to sleep with women. The absurdity of this didn’t seem to occur to many people. (After all, you may be straight, but do you sleep with every man - or woman - you meet, just because they fit your orientation?)
Too, I largely abandoned all of my friends from high school. It had been a complicated time, there were other issues… but there were good people in my life whom I simply did not believe could reconcile me, as I was, with their expectations. I never gave them the chance. Honestly, I don’t think I could have then. To come from a place where I felt so vulnerable that I would have killed myself before admitting who I was, to a place where I could unintentionally end up on the front page of the capitol newspaper as the representative for lesbian-gay pride, and not care, was a tremendous journey.
It wasn’t an easy journey. My parents lost clients because of my outspokenness. They were ex-communicated by a portion of their community. Neighbors bought out the land where my folks had planned to build a cabin, rather than having people with that sort of daughter nearby.
I changed my name… for many reasons, but among them so that who I was would impact only me and people who chose to stand by me.
I had a dear female lover who never acknowledged to her parents that we were lovers. I was extraordinarily circumspect with most of the women I was attracted to, to not lose friendship by making anyone uncomfortable. I knew that I was “over the line” by definition of who I was, and that in that time period and place, rejection for who I was was considered godly. I was myself, comfortable in my own skin, but I was not trusting my friends to be comfortable with me.
I left so many people behind rather than find out if they could have loved me as I was. It was a much better choice than continuing to be somebody I wasn’t. But it was a sad choice all the same.
It does get better. All these years later, I am raising children in a place where it is comparatively safe for them to be who they are, whomever that may be. It’s not easy yet, for them, for me, for anybody. It’s not easy for our lesbian and gay partnered friends who pray that if they are ever injured, it happens near a hospital that will recognize their relationships. It’s not easy for my young son, who doesn’t understand why anyone would judge someone for love. It’s not easy for my daughter, who rails against the arbitrary parameters of gender and sexuality. It’s not easy for me, after all this time, to know how to describe myself. I’ve been married to a man for sixteen years. I’ve been asked why it matters if I am bisexual? Can’t I just be politely, quietly, seemingly straight?
But it does matter. It matters because silence could have killed me. It matters because I want everyone out there to feel safe in their desires. Safe to love. It matters because my ex-girlfriends matter just as much as ex-boyfriends do, and I don’t want to stutter over those relationships when I talk about the past. I don’t want to stutter over my own life, out of consideration for someone else’s unneedful fear.
It gets better. But it only gets better as we continue to talk. As we continue to forgive. As we continue to fall in love. As we continue to imagine together a world where passion is never terminal… but opens a window into ourselves, and into possibility.
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