You’d think, since I work in politics that I a) would not be shocked by anything anymore, and b) would feel like I’m already doing plenty to right the ship.
Apparently, you’d be wrong. a) I am aghast at the blink-blink reaction of much of the country to the blatant, naked racism on display from the leader of our country. b) I feel like in the day-to-day of laundry, making dinner, planning doctor visits, yard work, etc., etc., I am not as committed to changing this as I could be. As I should be.
I know, I know, protect myself from burnout, you have to live your life, etc. I did not attend Friday’s marches, I went to the movies with my family instead, and I did it on purpose. I did it to protect myself. And yet, it has been almost a week and I cannot seem to shake the thought that I made the wrong decision.
At what point am I complicit, with my privilege, my money, my comfort, even though I do the work? I am afraid I have crossed that point, and am, in fact, complicit.
There’s always more to do, yes. But I think there’s always more we can do, even within our own limits.
My superpower is writing. Imma think on what I can do with it. Your ideas are welcome, but I’m not looking for plaudits or commiseration. Let’s do this.
I had an idea, reading an article on why nobody votes in local elections, and how some of it is that those elections are non-partisan, and therefore vague, difficult, or unimportant to voters.
What if, when or if local elections became partisan, the system was set up to accommodate more than two parties? What if then, once in office, people could explore what it means to gather with like minds around like ideas, and then work together and compromise? What if people could identify with something other than D or R when they ran?
We have a lot of issues in this country with the two-party system, and I have often tried to understand it—to explain it, to frame it—as two coalitions of people of many different “parties.” Greens and socialists and liberals and blue dogs and the lot gather and govern as the “Democrats.” But it is not set up that way, and the barriers to real multi-party elections are many, likely impossible to overcome at the Federal level. But what if we could explore it at the local level?
My objections to having partisan local elections are all about people voting Party-line without looking at candidates or issues. At the local level, a party machine could overwhelm the meager resources of local opponents. It would make politics even more political, if you can imagine. It would probably take some election reform the likes of which we have been unable to attain. But again, we’ve looked at that at the Federal level. What could we do at the local level?
Would this be a way for conservatives who are aghast at Trump to leave the Republican Party without having to become Democrats? Yes, clearly.
I know there are a myriad of problems with this idea. I grew up in Europe, so I have no rose-colored view of a many-party parliamentary style government. But what if?
Could this just be a sort of grassroots thing? “I’m Joe and I’m running for Mayor in line with the platform of the Green Thumb Party.” Could this be a way for conservatives to decry Trump and the Republican Party without having to become a Democrat? I know lots of them would like an option to do that.
If you like some songs by The Clash, listen to some today. Why not? Get reacquainted with their broken Spanish, deep lyrics, and ska-styled youth-outrage. Start with Something About England, for its horrific relevance to today.
If you like The Clash, you can’t go wrong with “one of the five weirdest albums of all time,” the original Sandinista! album. It is wacky, weird, has great cuts, and a short clip of schoolchildren singing Guns of Brixton. Warning, this album is long, and you kinda gotta like The Clash.
If you actually like The Clash a lot, do yourself a favor and check out The Sandinista Project, a collection of Clash covers. The site linked is about the creation of the album, but the album itself is pretty good (read: interesting), with a couple of standouts that I like better than the originals, notably Junco Partner by Jon Langford and Sally Timms. Of note, it does not include my very favorite Clash cover, The Guns of Brixton by Nouvelle Vague.
If you like The Clash like I do… you already have all those things. Carry on, you marvelous bastards.
I’m admittedly a bit of a political junkie (and it’s my day job!) but I found this much very amusing. Like a sports show, but about politics! Also, I’m not against an Al Franken presidency.
I could do with both less captioned commentary and more actual commentary. The captions take away from the experience, but the commentary really enhances it. First world problems.
My wife, Tiffany, is having a birthday today. It’s been a hell of a year, for a lot of reasons, mostly good, but you know how reasons are, lots of gray in with the black and white. So on the occasion of her birthday, I wanted to remind her that I love her.
She is my best friend, the one I tell all the secrets to. We share the looks that mean this, the tilt of the head that means that, the ancient jokes, the lifetime friends, the history, the tears, the uncontrollable giggling, the cold nights, the despair, and the heights of joy. We have the first house we owned together. We have the first dog we loved together. We have reams of old emails, and years of old texts. We have the books we love together, and too many seasons of guilty pleasure TV. We have those things that we have knit together into our life, together.
She is my lover. I know her, until I find new depths to wonder at, new resolve to envy, new whimsy to dance with, and then I want to get to know her all over again. I am amazed by her, her strength even when she doubts, her love even when she hurts, her compassion even when she is tired. There is nothing I desire that she does not embody. There is no other dance partner I fit. I am drawn to her, as to nothing else.
She is my partner. When I flounder, she is there for me, sometimes with a tender gesture, sometimes with a kick in the ass. When there’s blood, she handles it. When something smells bad, I return the favor. When I need to work, she shoulders the load. When she has one of those days, I want nothing more than to take it from her, that she can just enjoy what she loves. I would not have lived this life as well without her. I would not be who I am were she not here. I am in her debt, for all that she has made me.
She is the mother of my children. There is nothing more frightening than plucking your heart out and watching it walk around, play soccer, surf the internet, make friends, laugh, and cry. She is there for them, she is their friend, their partner, their love, their guide, their teacher. They would have half a life, if she were not there for them. I am a better father for her being their mother.
She is herself. Incredibly strong, but not without doubts. Confidently competent, but not without mistakes. Compassionately loving, but not without needs. Curious, but steadfast. Complex, but forthright. Beautiful, but intricate. Funny, but sensitive. Crass, but gentle. She is herself, and nothing else.
She makes me cry when I think about her too much, because she is my everything.
Yeah, it’s a safety pin.I’ve got a new piece of jewelry. On my bedside table, next to the earring I wear every day, I now keep a safety pin. In the morning, when I get dressed, I pin it on where it can be seen. I do this to let people who see it know that if they feel threatened, scared, sad, or displaced, I will do what I can to help.
It’s an action that was taken in the U.K. after Brexit, when immigrants and others suddenly found themselves unsettled in their own communities. It took hold here after the election.
A lot of people have taken umbrage at these safety pins. At first the election “winners” called it a symbol of hate. They said it was divisive. They said that it supports a culture of perpetual fear. Soon after, some on this side decried it as a bland, feel-good gesture that is ineffective, insincere, and fleeting. A nicety meant for white people to assuage their guilt.
I gently say to them, bullshit.
I’m not doing this out of shame. I’m not putting it on to look good to my friends. I’m not wearing it to claim some higher moral ground. I’m not belittling the fears of white people. I’m not pretending a safety pin will magically make black lives matter. This isn’t a symbol.
It’s an action.
It’s an offer of rescue, solidarity, and solace.
If you feel unsafe, or alone, or afraid, because you’re white, black, brown or another shade of humanity, because you have an accent or a drawl, because you wear certain clothes, because you work with your hands, or you despair over numbers at the dinner table, because you dare not walk alone at night, or you lie awake worrying about what will happen tomorrow… you deserve better. You deserve safety, community, and security.
I will work to meet people where their needs are. I will engage in my community to recognize these inequalities and make some difference. But I can’t always be doing that. I have a family, kids, the million things we all have that take away our best intentions in favor of just getting through the day.
So I wear the pin because I want you to know, even if I’m just out getting groceries, or going back to my car in a parking lot, or waiting in some line with you, that you’re safe with me.
I may not look like you. Or maybe I do. But you’ll know me by the safety pin. And by the way I won’t turn my back if you need me.
Added: There’s a lot of backlash to the safety pins, and a lot of backlash to that backlash. The article that started it, “Dear White People, Your Safety Pins Are Embarrassing,” has been reposted to Medium and Huffpost, which means it’s mostly click bait now. (His original story at his own site is swamped, and he has a second, more constructive post up now.) The comments, and I’ve read a couple hundred, mostly constitute a backlash of their own. Here are the important points:
Some marginalized people are grateful for the safety pins.
Many marginalized people are not giving it much thought, one way or the other.
No, the white nationalist movement is not co-opting it en masse, whatever one trolling graphic pretends to imply.
Yes, you definitely need to do more than put on a safety pin and pretend you fixed it.
For me, wearing it yesterday, it made me think. It made me uncomfortable, probably in the right ways. More present in the world I was walking through. Aware of what the black woman at the radio station might be thinking.
Finally, my bit above was not meant to encourage anyone else to wear a safety pin. It was explaining why I am.
I am eager to hear why you might wear one, or won’t wear one, or what you think about it.
Today is my birthday. I share it with a national tragedy. I like to acknowledge both. For the birthday, I share it with my friends and family. For the other, I share it here.
On the day I turned thirty-one, terrorists killed 3,000 people in the United States. It was a horrific moment of awakening for this country, a moment that those of us who had grown up overseas thought we understood. I grew up with car bombs on the news and in my city. It had only been a matter of time, I thought, before the United States would have had to face it. American headlines screamed that “The World has Changed!” and I remember thinking that was a lot of hubris.
I did not account for what the United States would do in response. This was a moment that could have touched off a world-shaking drive for peace, compassion, and a better future. Instead, we launched a world-shearing assault on “terrorists,” which has, in most reasonable estimates, been responsible for the deaths of almost 5,000 US service members in Iraq alone, and between 100,000 and 1 million Iraqis. The issue is not as stark as these numbers make it out to be, the world is a muddy mess, even at its best. But that is a lot of blood spilled in vengeance. The world did change after all. And our country was the agent of that change.
I’m not asking to compare the three thousand victims of 9/11 to the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Iraq War. That is a scale that will never balance. Instead, I am asking us to put ALL the deaths on one side. What goes on the other side then?
For my birthday wish, I would like us to reflect on these scales, and do what we can to see them balance.
File under, “Lessons learned while writing.” I have a tendency to throw details into a story that explain a problem in my head, but are not meant to go further than that. But a reader, who is not in my head, reads that detail as crucial, and chases it down the rabbit hole until they realize it is just a dead end. Frustrating. And no tiny doors to climb through at the bottom.
For example. A new character shows up out of the blue, and announces that he is here to investigate an old death that he believes is murder most foul. Murder? How unexpected! How juicy! Who died, and why? Who is this murder investigator? Tell me more!
But the investigator is really here for some other reason. He made up the murder investigation as a cover. I move on with his real motivation, and ignore the murder, because, what murder? Boring!
But the reader is intrigued, then confused, then lost, then maybe disappointed and angry. And when they emerge from the other end of the stages of grief, they have missed all the good stuff I was doing in the meantime.
I’m not much one for New Year’s resolutions. After all, I am resolving to do things differently better all the time, not just once a year. Last month I resolved to write more, and a few days before that, I resolved to stop beating myself up about not writing more.
But I know it’s a significant arbitrary date, and a lot of people use the first of the year to set new goals. To lose weight, to work better, to be happier. Apparently a significant number of people pick a word to define their hopes for a new year. “Focus,” or “Publish,” or “Beardify.” That seems like a lot of pressure for one word, on one date.
Some time ago, I hit upon a New Year’s resolution that seemed cheeky enough to be fun, but had a kernel of actual self-improvement within, and I have gone with that one every year since.
I resolve (once again) to curse more.
Until this year, I just meant that I should use colorful language more, in conversation mostly, but also in my writing. I should cuss and curse and use the full breadth that English allows, to make my points. After all, if you don’t overuse it, cursing can be a very effective accent to what you’re trying to say. Even cursing a blue streak has its uses.
But this year it occurred to me that really, I could change it up by resolving to curse more something. After all, as it turns out, I’ve been resolving to curse more frequently, right?
I could also resolve to curse more eloquently. Or creatively. I could repurpose the non-cursing lexicon for creative cursing, like Captain Haddock (“Blistering barnacles!”) or Sylvester (“Suffering succotash!”). Or I could make up words that sound like bad words, like the writers of Battlestar Galactica did with the not-so-popular-anymore “Frack!”
And then of course, there’s the actual cursing. Hexing. Spiting. Eye of newt. I could do some of that. There are a lot of very creative and fun ways to actually curse people, though I’d recommend sticking to wordy curses, and keeping the hair gathering to a minimum. The trick to wordy cursing (and bad-word cursing, too) is to do it in the flow of circumstance, not five minutes later, when nobody but your momma cares. Years ago I conceptualized a context-aware device I called the Portable Noel Coward that would spit out timely rejoinders right when you needed them. Cursing might need a similar thing.
Or I might just need practice. Like a crossword puzzle regimen for my wit.
So. I resolve to exercise my mind, to leave my comfort zone, to push myself. I resolve to curse more, and may your warts grow warts if you don’t like it.
