Road Trip: One Amazing Thing

I started writing a post titled “Human beings do amazing things,” and I was telling you all about the amazing things encountered on this trip: art, museum exhibits, architecture, theater, food. But there was just too much. It got boring: This great thing, that great thing, oh and another great thing.

So I’m just going to tell you about one thing. Who knew that the Gettysburg Museum & Visitor Center would float to the top of my list?

I had my qualms about the whole stop in Gettysburg, thinking it might be a chronicle of this general and that battle and those maneuvers. I’m tired of the militarization of American history; our chapters go from war to war: Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Civil War, World War I, etc etc. What if instead our chapters went from invention to invention or economy to economy, peace to peace? What would things look like if most of our monuments were all about peacekeepers, good Samaritans, educators, farmers?

There were 51,000 casualties in three days at Gettysburg. This is no victory celebration site; this is a cemetery. By the end, the Civil War killed more Americans than any other war: 620,000 people.

Gettysburg is a museum of War – of the toll it takes

of the people who die

of the people who have to bury them

of the equipment they have to carry

of the equipment they don’t have

of the heat

of their heavy uniforms

of the photographers and journalists who witness their deaths

of the weight of decisions to make and mistakes that are made

of canteens collected and water not found

of regret and despair

of the whims of chance and who had the higher ground and who they couldn’t see in the dark

of medics and disease and amputations

 

of the women left behind and the families splintered.

of freedom fought for and yet freedom undelivered.

It’s all arranged chronologically, by the three days of the battle. We walk those three days. It’s a brilliantly designed museum. We feel those three days.

Sometimes you learn things by slowly absorbing them, bit by bit. And then, every now and then, you get a direct infusion to the brain. The Gettysburg Museum is a 2 x 4 to the head and heart: War is hell; freedom is worth fighting for; equality is not done.

At the end of the museum, there’s a continuously-running film that ends with the 50-year reunion at Gettysburg. President Wilson invited white veterans of both sides, and a famous handshake between white Union and Confederate soldiers took place. Black soldiers were relegated to setting up tents and cleaning latrines.

All those dead people, and this is where we are.

I read further and the story of the racism of the 1913 centennial is even worse. In 1963, at the 100th anniversary, President Johnson gave his Gettysburg address:

“The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him — we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil — when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’”

That was in 1963, but still equality is not done.

The next day, we did the outdoor tour of Gettysburg. You can hire a guide or you can follow along in your car and listen to Ranger Gwinn describe the sites on your smart phone.

Little light interlude because this is all so heavy:

I was very happy because Ranger Gwinn does a wonderful job at each site, but mostly: I got make-your-own waffles for breakfast! All through this trip, the hotel breakfasts have been reduced to grab-and-go breakfasts because of Covid. I love make-your-own waffles, but I have only been able to stare longingly at the dormant waffle makers. Not in Gettysburg! Waffles for breakfast!

We went on to Washington, D.C, where white flags at the Washington Monument memorialize American Covid deaths – 700,327 when we were there. As far as the eye could see. We’d passed the Civil War milestone.

No, Gettysburg was not a depressing element of our trip, but it was thoughtful, sobering, and unforgettable.

Notched Up and Flammable

Back in June, I read an article in my Head Butler newsletter from Jesse Kornbluth. He described a book, Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. The passages he quotes highlight the ordinary insults/belittling/denigration African Americans face living in our society. But he said the book was like poetry, so I put it on hold at my library.

I started and finished it yesterday. It's short.

Part I of the book is bits of what white people will actually say to black people. Horrible things. But all very believable.

Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard?

Part II of the book is about Serena Williams and what she has had to put up with as a strong, black woman in the white world of tennis. Rankine describes the bad calls against Serena by tennis umpires – five of them in the 2004 U.S. Open alone.

By now, I’m enraged. I like and admire Serena Williams, but I don’t follow tennis, so I didn’t know any of the bad calls, public ridicule, etc etc. This is all new to me, and I’m in a lather. How dare they treat her like that! How dare they think her anger is uncalled for!

I am sputtering with fury, fueled with rage, so I go online to Goodreads to register that I’m “currently reading” the book.

Huh? Goodreads shows that I’ve already marked the book as “read” back in 2017. And it only has three stars.

My First Reaction
Somebody has hacked my Goodreads account! Someone is adding books to my “read” list that I haven’t read. How have they gotten my password? And they’re throwing in fake star reviews, too; this book is clearly four stars. This is terrible!

Tim, witnessing both my Serena rage and the uproar over my hacked book list, mutters something about how it wasn’t, after all, my bank account.

But this is my book list! So I inspect other books recorded for 2017: Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. Yes, I read those. How deep has the hacking gone?

Ah, but back in 2017, I also kept a separate, non-Internet list of books I’d read. I can check against that. And there it is: I read Citizen: An American Lyric in May of 2017.

My Second Reaction
Dementia has set in, and I am one step away from assisted living. How could I have read a book, had such a strong reaction, and have absolutely no memory of it?

I tell people I have never read Kafka, that it’s a hole in my literary history. And then, many years ago, while cleaning out my mother’s attic, I came across a paper I wrote comparing the writings of Nietzsche and Kafka. I was thorough: the bibliography was comprehensive. Yes, I know my Nietzsche well, but I have never, ever read any Kafka.

Wherever Kafka is, so is Citizen: An American Lyric.

I read the rest of the book, hoping I’ll come across an aha! moment of recognition. It doesn’t happen. What does happen is Part III and Part IV and Part V and Part VI of regular and consistent humiliations and deaths of unarmed black men and mistreatment and the squashing of anger because to be black and “Yes, and this is how you are a citizen. Come on. Let it go. Move on.” But all expressed … lyrically … so it hurts to see ugliness described beautifully.

My Third Reaction
It’s 2021 today, and 2017 must have been a long, long time ago. 2019 was a long time ago.

Like the rest of America, I’m notched up. Claudia Rankine says it herself, that these moments accumulate in the body: “I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up.”

Her book does that, but in 2021, I am already saturated. I am a tinderbox and just one more story of social injustice, of people wronged or ignored, of rights lost, and I ignite. I am just a spark away from outrage.

So is the rest of America.

My Fourth Reaction
I’m coordinating meetings with my senators in support of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. (Email me if you’re interested.)

There, that sounds reasonable and calm and restrained, right? Like I can conduct myself properly. You wouldn’t know the desperation I feel about things not getting better. I’m not running crazy through the streets, shouting on street corners, tearing my hair out. At least, not on the outside. (Trust me, I still am on the inside.)

My hope? That we all reach our own Fourth Reactions, whatever shape they take. We just need to do something.

Eager for the Revolution

I’m apologizing in advance. This post is about Me, in a time when Me needs to shut up and let others do the talking. But if my voice can add volume to the uproar and support to the weary, here I go.

I’m in my Third Third, and I have been waiting for the revolution since 1968. Or maybe it was 1964 when the three Freedom Riders were killed in Mississippi. I was sure it would happen in 1968 as assassination after assassination shook us to our core. I thought once you get horrified, once you SEE; you fix things.

But with every single new outrage – and we have had lots of outrages since 1964 – I thought, “This is SO HORRIFIC, so INHUMANE, this will be the straw that broke the camel’s back. This will spark the change.”

But it just kept on happening. Last week, I would have just chronicled all my furies, thrown my rage and MAD CAPITALIZATION around, and succumbed to the despair that nothing changes, injustice wins, hope is lost, racism is forever. I wasn’t going to see it end in my lifetime. That’s what I was going to say.

But maybe, maybe, this is a bit different. (Can it be? Can it be?) Maybe, maybe, eyes are opening. (Can it be? Can it be?) Maybe, maybe people are willing to see – can’t avoid seeing? – that racism is poisoning our society. That people of color have had to walk a much harder and more dangerous life. A MUCH harder and way more dangerous life.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, America was “appalled” at the poverty exposed. Mostly white police blocked an escape route out for the mostly black refugees; they didn’t want them in their suburb. It took a recent book to expose the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman whose cells were used to develop a polio vaccine, advances in medicine, potential anti-cancer drugs … making lots of money for pharmaceutical companies but her family can’t even afford health insurance. And people are only now noticing that people of color receive unequal health services because they’re over-represented in Covid-19 cases? Only now??? 

Uh, oh. My optimism is precarious; it’s starting to give way. I wake up and tell Tim I’ve had another angry dream. He looks at me, “And that’s a surprise?” I want Martin Luther King’s dream, dammit!

Unarmed Eric Garner can’t breathe in New York in 2014, but unarmed George Floyd still can’t breathe and is murdered in Minneapolis in 2020. In between, there were unarmed Michael Brown and unarmed Freddie Gray and too many others. Can this be any clearer?

But to me, the thing that really shows the ugliness and racism that lurks and poisons is Amy Cooper. A regular white woman who doesn’t want to put her dog on a leash in a park KNOWS that she can call the police and shout “African American man” and get results. She can scare the shit out of him and potentially get him arrested or killed.

Isn’t that just the ugly truth of our society?

In 1964, people died trying to help black Americans vote. In 2020, Republicans decide people should die voting in Wisconsin. In 1965, police broke up a peaceful march in Selma with nightsticks and tear gas. In 2020, police tear-gassed a peaceful protest in Washington, D.C. so the President could get a photo op with a Bible in front of a church. In our third thirds, we’ve witnessed the sheer tenacity of injustice. It’s the story of our lives.

Can I even face getting my hopes up again?

White men with automatic rifles stand in front of the Michigan state Capitol; no police break up their protest. Yet African American protesters carrying signs and “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” get tear-gassed. Journalists with visible microphones and cameras are deliberately attacked.

No wonder people are angry! I’ve been waiting decades to see justice done, to see racism faced, to see privilege acknowledged, to see wrongs righted … and I haven’t even been paying that price. A whole host of our population has been waiting – and paying the price – for hundreds of years. I’m angry that this is the world we’re giving our children.

This America that we value is just a popular and enduring myth. It’s only aspirational until – finally – we face ourselves and our institutions and make it a reality. Is this the time? Is it finally NOW? Finally? In our lifetimes?

We have work to do.

One foot in front of the other

I’d hoped that by my Third Third, I would have achieved some Wisdom. I thought Wisdom would be kind of mellow, that I’d feel content and solid and calm.

I spent election day happily welcoming A-->L and M-->Z voters  (A-->Ls beat M-->Zs 656 to 491, as expected). Then I heard the results. So now I’m processing this all, and it’s taking me a long time. Sometimes I cry, sometimes I am angry angry angry. Sometimes I’m vindictive; sometimes I’m passive. None of it feels like Wisdom. It’s an Elisabeth Kübler-Ross process. Bear with me.

Day One, Wednesday
Overpowering grief settled on me, overwhelming futility, despair, and sadness. A lifetime of fighting mental other-ness and I succumbed, for the first time, to not getting out of bed. I stayed there. Even my mother’s death didn’t put me there; the election put me there.

It wasn’t because my candidate lost. My candidates mostly always lose. I live in a “red” state; most people vote differently from how I do. I can handle that.

In fact, it’s precisely because I’m “very blue” that I have been saying all along that people left out of prosperity aren’t stupid. The stupid ones are the 1% that thought they could keep this up forever, that they could keep people scraping by while they lived at the top of the food chain.

But it’s turned out that prosperity may not have really been the issue at all. One Trump supporter told me America needed to return to the time “when men were men,” when women didn’t act like men, when there weren’t so many homosexuals around. One said, “We’ll never go back to Black again.” And the anti-Semitism has been so overt I can pick it up without a “dog whistle.”

I believe in making America great again. If we’re in our Third Third, we share the same decades, but they weren’t the same for all of us. Some of us couldn’t buy homes in certain areas or swim in their pools. We girls couldn’t take shop class and play the sports we might want to. Some of us were discouraged from applying to certain colleges because they didn’t take “our kind.” Some of us couldn’t vote.

That’s not the great America I want to return to. In fact, returning to that America would mean my America was dead. I knew my mother would die; I didn’t know my America would.

Day Two, Thursday
I feel like every single person who voted for Donald Trump is telling me I have no place in America. They’re telling me my daughter has no place here. They’re telling me my gay family and friends, my Muslim students, my Black friends, my Spanish-speaking friends have no place here. In fact, I probably have the wrong friends. Oh, maybe they’ll make an exception for me because they know me, but the world they want to return to has no place for me.

Maybe the Trump voters felt like all the changes in society meant they have no place here. Where could they go to get away from gays, from bossy women, from “Happy Holidays”? From black lives mattering, from people speaking Spanish? From people wanting to limit guns sold to mentally ill people?

But we’re just one country geographically. How are we going to share?

Day Three, Friday
But how can we share a country with people who want us not to exist? Are gay people supposed to vaporize? Non-Christians, too? People who speak other languages?

Let me try an example, a very personal one. Maybe you think America was great because there was prayer in school. But I have a different memory: I spent every morning of my elementary school years being forced to pray to Jesus – not my religion – in public school. On Fridays, when class was released at lunch time for catechism, only the Brown kids remained. Let me tell you how much our teachers liked that. Let me tell you what it was like when I was told to stand up at Christmas concerts because I was different: “Santa will never come to Barbara’s house.”

And I was in privileged America. My parents could buy a house in a white neighborhood, watch it appreciate in value, and create a nest egg for the future. Black families were denied that option.

Ask me if that’s the great America I want to return to.

I’ll tell you what I miss about America, the one I wouldn’t mind returning to. I miss common courtesy. I miss kindness. Now violence, bigotry, and meanness have been unleashed. People are saying things OUT LOUD that are appalling and threatening. Swastikas are being painted on store windows, the KKK is planning a victory parade, our new president bragged about sexual assault. He incited this and condoned this, and people voted for this.

It was here that I’d written that if someone didn’t vote, they couldn’t complain. And now I’ll say that if they voted for Trump, they have to own it. They can’t say, “I didn’t know it would be like this” or “I was just being a good Republican.” The whole campaign functioned on a racist, anti-Semitic basis at its core, and if they didn’t speak against it, they have to own it.

I’ve often wondered how the people who screamed at Black children integrating schools in the South, who were photographed with their hateful signs, felt years later when those photographs re-surfaced. Did they say, “It was different back then” or “I see I was wrong”? Did they own the damage they caused, the fear and terror they put into a young child’s life? And what about the silent people who let them do it?

It was hard to find a Nazi after World War II, and eventually, it may be hard to find a Trump supporter. People living near Auschwitz could claim they didn’t know what was going on, but I will MAKE SURE people know the damage they wreak. I am an avenging angel. I am Rage.

Day Four, Saturday
Garrison Keillor wrote that “Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen….” and I am outraged. How can someone tout privilege like that? How can someone dismiss the rightful concerns of so much of the population? The Democratic Party is part of the problem. They got us into this mess because they protected their inner circle, they catered to the 1%, they didn’t listen! No one in power was listening! People are being left out of prosperity, out of opportunity!

No one is listening!

Yes, I sound like a Trump supporter. Bernie supporters start at the same place, with the people who’ve been left out.

I shared a house once with a young man who told me he wasn’t into the political work I was doing. He said letting more people have “some” meant he would have “less,” whether it was money or power or even access. He was not into sharing if he could hold onto “all.”

Now I’m angry at everyone.

Day Five, Sunday
I see Arrival, the movie, and I step out of my angry present. Wisdom, I think, is always relearning empathy. Do you know my reasons? Do I know yours? I have not stood in your shoes and you have not stood in mine.

I have spent most of my professional life crossing divides, whether labor with management, political positions, social causes. I have taught, lectured, and run entire programs about “seeking first to understand.”

My Third Third is not the time to start demonizing people.

Whew.

As many of my friends have been consoling sobbing daughters over the last few days, my friend Helen told hers it wasn’t like after other elections, it was more like after her cancer diagnosis: “It wasn’t at all hard to decide what to do then – NOT run away and hide … or give up and give in to pessimistic projections of a doomed future. The only viable option for me was to fight as hard as I could and force myself to believe in an eventually positive outcome, despite the awful things I’d have to endure along the way.”

It’s going to be very, very hard if our climate is destroyed for that future; if families are broken up over papers and documentation; if more children grow up afraid. So I will stand with Standing Rock on Tuesday, I will march with a million women in January, and I will continue to teach English to refugees and immigrants. I am a brave Big Mouth – here and elsewhere – but I hope I will be a kind one. I miss kindness.

Is it finally too much?

“Call them mommy” “Hurry”

I still can’t even think of that text message exchange without crying. I can’t imagine being the mother on the end of the phone at 2 in the morning and feeling so utterly helpless. No, I can imagine it. That’s why I sit here with tears splashing down my face even days later.

Every now and then I think I’ve become numb to any more horror. I notice on Facebook that everyone was “Charlie” once for a while, but now they’re not “Pulse.” We just can’t keep thinking of new ways to say “This time it got to me, this time I am so so so so sad.” And then I hear of a text message to “mommy.”

If you’re in your Third Third, then assassination looms large in your life: President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X. Those were horrific and formative to the selves we were to become, but did we ever think our futures would involve this number of shootings against the general public?

Yes, there’s an important qualification to this: many of these acts aren’t against the “general” public; they’re against African Americans or gays. They’re hate crimes. But as one friend of mine put it, if you can kill 20 little kids in an elementary school in Sandy Hook and NOTHING CHANGES, then we’re all sitting ducks.

Oh, not you? Because you carry a gun? Oh, lucky that your kid isn’t hiding in the closet, you think it’s a home invasion, and you shoot your kid. Or you shoot the poor trick-or-treater. Or your kid finds your guns and shoots himself.

I live in Alaska. I know people can use guns responsibly. I’ve eaten meat killed by someone with a gun. I even did a day of Shotguns and Stilettos with Becoming an Outdoorswoman. I’ve also been a victim of armed robbery by a guy who shot off his gun before robbing us (real sign of crazy man). The only time I felt fear in the outdoors was when three guys showed up at camp with a boom box, lots of six-packs, and three rifles.

I ride a bicycle. Every single time I’m on the road, I am aware that cars are bigger than I am and I have to make choices that reflect that: Get eye contact before you cross, ride here not there. I am more careful because cars are bigger. (And yet you also had to take a test and get a license before you could drive that big car on the road.)

I used to feel a certain measure of control about physically defending myself; I took self-defense classes. But introduce a gun, and he’s bigger. Introduce an assault rifle and he’s HUGE.

If other people keep getting bigger, we run out of ways we can compensate by being careful. We all run out of ways of staying safe. If my gun is bigger than your gun, do you have to get a bigger gun? We’ve created mutually assured destruction in our lives, our very own escalating arms race.

People say guns don’t kill people, people do. So what’s the problem about looking at the people buying them? What’s the problem with saying guns are meant to kill meat (if you must) or even one person at a time (if you really must…)? But what’s with the kill-dozens-at-once assault rifles? I have not heard anyone pause, think quietly, and give me a good answer to these questions.

The thing is, there’s so much anger floating around right now, we’re all on somebody’s list and we’ve all got our own lists. Somebody doesn’t like your political party, the country his parents came from, how your pants hang, her grammar, your fancy car. Face it, none of us are list-proof and none of us are without our own lists. We’ve become a boiling mess of anger and this is whom we’re arming?

Make no mistake, we are arming them: We set them loose on the elementary school kids in Sandy Hook. We set them loose on the employees at a holiday party. Our silence and inaction set them loose on the 141 other mass shootings listed on the Gun Violence Archive for 2016.

And yes, all of us set the guy loose on the young man who asked “mommy” to hurry. I hope it’s not your kid or my kid who calls next.

Everytown for Gun Safety

The fruits of slavery

Recently, a national columnist wrote about how university presidents were being removed because of whining college students. She even remarked on the example of students – whining students – being subjected to racial slurs.

Whoa… Are you whining when you stand up and say, “Enough!”? When this problem keeps happening and happening and the administration does nothing … and only listens when the football team stands up, too? I must admit, I thought it was brilliant to get the football team’s support. Many football players leave university with barely a college education (not to mention brain injury), but they will have brought in alumni money. What a game changer to have them involved!

A few days ago, I heard about the Harvard Law students wanting to change the official seal because it depicts sheaves of wheat from the Royall family crest. The Royall family were slave traders. One person interviewed asked, “What are we going to do? Change the name of our capital because Washington owned slaves?”

Hmm, this is an interesting question. I thought, “What if the seal featured a swastika?” That would really offend me, make me feel like every time I saw it, it was saying, “You’re not welcome here.” That’s why we object to the flying of the Confederate flag.

But then I thought about what a new university seal would mean. It would mean that no one would know about Harvard’s history coming out of the slave trade. It could quietly disappear from awareness. We could pretend it didn’t happen. What’s the best way to proceed?

I recently read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me. Coates is a powerful writer, and he writes things like “Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.”

“Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”

When I visited my sister in Berlin, I saw Stolpersteine, cobblestones or “stumbling blocks,” laid into the sidewalks in front of residences where people had been deported and later exterminated in concentration camps. They’re meant to remind people – maybe even those living in the residences – that they can live there because someone else was murdered.

We don’t have anything like that in the U.S. Imagine if people who bought homes with FHA loans had to put markers in front of their houses saying that they qualified for federal mortgages – and the homes which appreciated in value – because they were white, that nonwhites were barred from living there. What if when those houses were sold, their heirs had to sign a paper acknowledging that their inheritance was a result of the racism practiced by the U.S. government in enforcing housing segregation and the creation of ghettos?

I don’t know how many of you I’m losing here, but I firmly believe that racism is so ingrained that we don’t realize how many of our benefits TODAY accrue from that.

So what if the Harvard law students instead insisted that everywhere the seal existed, there had to be a companion statement: “These sheaves of wheat represent the slave trade, which was instrumental in financing the founding of Harvard Law”? Hey, we require warnings on cigarette cartons. Ooh, I just discovered a revised seal showing black slaves hauling the sheaves of wheat!

Oh, no, here I am in my Third Third, and I still prefer the in-your-face approach to social change. But you know what? Yesterday I thought about where I was when Star Wars came out. And then I thought of where I was when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Civil Rights defined our formative years, and I’m disheartened, frustrated, and so angry that the wrongs continue unacknowledged.

I wish America could confront our “moral debts.” I wish America could become whole.