We love the image of the conquering hero, carried triumphant through the streets, and behind him we place the slave to whisper, "Remember, thou art mortal."
I have my own whispering slave, and I think each of us does. It's how we clip our own wings, and turn our strength to weakness. Mine waits until that moment when I see someone struggling and step forward to say, "Hey, do you need a hand with that?"
And then it hisses, "This is how Ted Bundy killed people."
My voice of mortality says no good deed goes unpunished. It points out that altruism is probably not an individual evolutionary advantage, though the complexity of human relationships often makes it a social one. It tells me I'm statistically more likely, running towards trouble, to be hurt or killed than those who run away from it.
There have been times in my life that I thought "I have made a decision that may kill me." Maybe I got back on the road when I was probably too tired to drive safely, maybe I worked my way out onto the unsteady path before considering just how deserted the trail was and how far that drop went, maybe I called out that guy harassing women on the corner without knowing if he had friends, or even just a knife and a grudge.
The truth is that we never know until it happens which will be the decision that confirms the mortality. Maybe it's as simple as 'I keep meaning to get that mole checked out, and putting it off.' Or just stopping for the yellow light instead of gunning through the intersection, so that five miles down the road we cross paths with the speeding truck. When you really consider it, every single decision you make every day could be the one that makes you mortal, and there's no way to know.
Kind of paralyzing, no?
When I first came to this understanding, this pure helplessness to predict a safe course, my impulse was to curl up in a dark quiet room and do absolutely nothing. But then I came back to that thing I said earlier, about being statistically more likely to be killed running towards trouble than away from it, and I realised there was a qualifier to it: by the trouble. Running away from trouble, especially when they're other people's problems, only decreases the chance that particular situation will harm you. It can't make you safe. You are never entirely safe.
The statistical likelihood of death is 100% for me, as it is for everyone else. I will die, and in hindsight I will be able to see the choice or set of choices that led to the circumstances of my death.
This would suggest that the ideal course in life is to make every single decision worth dying for. To live a life of such epic courage and adventure it gets its own soundtrack. But I don't have that option. Bills must be paid, tires must be rotated, sinks must be scrubbed and the laundry never stops needing to be folded. It's hard to maintain that level of significance in every choice, to wash the dishes as if your life depended on how you did it, because it just might.
I release the small decisions, the ones of fate and chance, the 'do I cut through the parking lot or wait at the light?' the 'do I wear sandals or tennis shoes?' It's good to weigh risks on decisions, but it's not reasonable to spend your life calculating detailed risk assessments for every left turn or breakfast taco.
Instead, I listen for the voice, for that hissing whisper just behind my right shoulder. I interpret that voice as my subconscious alerting me to choices that define me, choices that give me a chance to *earn* my mortality and its rewards. Yes, I tell it, Ted Bundy used people's kindness to prey on them. But kindness keeps the mechanism of human interaction moving, and a life of choosing to be kind instead of afraid is worth living. Yes, love leads to grief and loss, and it can end in betrayal, but in the life I want to lead that's a risk you have to take. I may have few opportunities to live an epic life, but I have many many chances to live a pattern I'll look back gladly on creating.
I'm still often painfully aware of my mortality, but I've stopped resenting that whisperer, because in trying to clip my wings, it's inadvertently pointing out opportunities to fly.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
On Complexity, Nuance, and Lazy Storytelling
I first read "Game of Thrones" shortly after it came out. I was entranced by the world, and the characters, and as each subsequent book was written I devoured it and began the long wait for the next. "Read this!" I gleefully told friends, building a small community of people I could talk to about the books, swapping theories and ideas for what was coming. I put a dent in a wall with the corner of the book when I read the Red Wedding; I had understood why Ned Stark had to die like a Disney parent, but Robb was supposed to WIN, dammit.
Initially, I wasn't particularly aware of a lot of the issues around which the books are problematic. My view of racism was not particularly nuanced, so "Have you noticed that most of the nonwhite characters are kinda...savage?" escaped me. Likewise, there's a remarkable tendency towards sexual violence, and most of the non-heterosexual characters are pretty bald stereotypes. Most of that went right over my head, I'm sad to say, until friends began pointing out their own concerns.
My journey with the books and social awareness has been a long study in liking something problematic. I started from the traditional rationalization positions: this is just a book, don't take it so seriously, there's much worse stuff in the real world, and so on. Eventually, I did finally face the reality that this thing I love is deeply flawed, and it's flawed in ways that mean it may be perpetuating things I work against. But what to do?
There seem to be three ways speculative fiction can address sexual violence and racial/sexual inequality. There's the Star Trek approach of handwaving it all away in "and then we were ALL equal! The end!" Never mind that even in the magical equality of the Star Trek Universe, there are still some pretty glaring examples of racist and sexist casting and writing.
The second approach is to create the world where terrible things happen, but make your protagonists shine by inexplicably developing an aversion to the parts of your world that don't fit with modern sensibilities. You give them parents who, in a world populated by slave labor for generations, raised them to see everyone as equal. You give them an aversion to a 16-year-old bride when the entire culture is based on menarche as the signifier of marital availability. Usually, the protagonist doesn't have a compelling reason for opting out of his entire culture besides "He just knew it was wrong." You never put them through the process of examining that culture and evaluating it critically. And most importantly, you create a world where you use horrible things being done to some people as a way to shorthand "My character is a decent guy because he opts out of this terrible culture I created!" This is the most common approach, and it's the one I like the least because it's lazy.
The third approach is my personal preference, and it's best exemplified by Babylon 5 and the Song of Ice and Fire *novels*. You create a world in which racism and sexism and bigotry are real, and then you force your characters to navigate that world as decent human beings with the socialization they would have had living in it. Babylon 5 is notable for its frank address of racism, though they used nonhuman races for a broader view, so that it's less obviously a critique on modern culture -- but it still is. Because guess what? We live in a culture where some people think an accident of demographics makes one less worthy of basic respect and decency, so B5's constant struggle to blend disparate and sometimes incomprehensible cultures is a useful reflection of ways we ourselves often approach it. Some work, some don't, but you end up really thinking about it either way.
Game of Thrones' racial representation is problematic and there's really no way to handwave around it. I just have to say "Yes, there's some pretty blatant racism there and if I ever meet GRRM I'mma ask him what the hell he was thinking." But the books' sexual representation is much more nuanced and interesting. How does a decent person raised in a culture where there is no such thing as statutory rape navigate an obviously frightened and anxious child bride? The notable scene between Danaerys and Khal Drogo in the book involves a lot of nonverbal communication and shared pleasure until her comfort level allows her to consent -- and lays the foundation for their loving relationship. In the show, this was shorthanded to a painful, horrifying rape scene, which turns Dany's embrace of her culture and her marriage into an uncomfortable Stockholm-syndrome feel.
Tyrion's marriage to Sansa is another one of those nuanced situations. He's been given a beautiful bride, formerly betrothed to a king and conditioned since birth to be someone's lady wife, and commanded to bed her by a father who's displayed a consistent willingness to murder those who balk him. He tries; they get as far as taking off their clothes. At the same time, he's looking at this terrified child, whose father his family murdered in front of her, whose younger brothers and sisters are presumed dead, who's been a hostage for months, and he just...can't. Not because of her age, but because of the pure brutality of the situation and that he can't make anything good for her, just less horrible, and the least horrible option is "I won't touch you until you ask me to." Sansa displays a lot of character in the book there, first steeling herself to endure it and then mustering the courage to ask him, "And what if I never ask, my lord?" That chapter really seals her understanding that all her childhood fairy tale dreams are dead, that Tyrion Lannister is the only prince she gets. This is glossed in the series, as he just sends her to bed like a child and drinks himself to sleep on a sofa.
The last piece in this puzzle of the series failing the books is Jaime's much-talked-about rape of Cersei. In the book, it's an incredibly complicated scene that really demonstrates the complete dysfunction of their relationship. So much of their relationship has been grounded in that whole "It's wrong, but I want it, but I feel guilty, but I want it," on both their parts. In the series, it's...the creepy hate-rape of your sister next to your mutual dead child's corpse. This makes me as angry as Drogo's rape of Danaerys does. First, because hey, isn't there enough rape and brutality in the story without adding more?
Second, because it strips characters of a chance to develop. Jaime's long and conflicted arc of becoming a better human being, of overcoming the single stain of killing Aerys Targaryen, just stops right there. I can't see how the producers can possibly bring him back from this. Cersei's loss of agency and depth there just makes her another boring victim for another angry man. Drogo becomes just another savage possessing a woman who's been given as a gift, not a partner sharing joy with a fellow human being. Danaerys' subsequent transformation into comfortable khaleesi makes no sense. Sansa, who'd finally been beginning to develop past whining, becomes just another trial for Tyrion to manage (though the producers did keep the subtle beginnings of what might have been a long and comfortable friendship had circumstances not intervened).
It's a much more interesting story to watch people navigate complex situations than it is to watch them go through the motions of rebelling against the status quo and ultimately be destroyed by it. To say I'm disappointed that the shows are taking a lazy approach the books avoided is understatement.
On the whole, I've been pleased with the adaptations. I understand that in a book with hundreds of named characters, sometimes you need to combine a few or cut a few for the sake of a comprehensible story line. I understand that some storylines that interest me may be trivial to the outcome, just there for worldbuilding, so they might not make the cut.
But destroying one of the things Martin really did *right* by facing questions of sexual agency and power, and reducing those situations to rape and torture porn for shock value, is a grave disservice to the whole series, and to those of us who've loved it for years.
Initially, I wasn't particularly aware of a lot of the issues around which the books are problematic. My view of racism was not particularly nuanced, so "Have you noticed that most of the nonwhite characters are kinda...savage?" escaped me. Likewise, there's a remarkable tendency towards sexual violence, and most of the non-heterosexual characters are pretty bald stereotypes. Most of that went right over my head, I'm sad to say, until friends began pointing out their own concerns.
My journey with the books and social awareness has been a long study in liking something problematic. I started from the traditional rationalization positions: this is just a book, don't take it so seriously, there's much worse stuff in the real world, and so on. Eventually, I did finally face the reality that this thing I love is deeply flawed, and it's flawed in ways that mean it may be perpetuating things I work against. But what to do?
There seem to be three ways speculative fiction can address sexual violence and racial/sexual inequality. There's the Star Trek approach of handwaving it all away in "and then we were ALL equal! The end!" Never mind that even in the magical equality of the Star Trek Universe, there are still some pretty glaring examples of racist and sexist casting and writing.
The second approach is to create the world where terrible things happen, but make your protagonists shine by inexplicably developing an aversion to the parts of your world that don't fit with modern sensibilities. You give them parents who, in a world populated by slave labor for generations, raised them to see everyone as equal. You give them an aversion to a 16-year-old bride when the entire culture is based on menarche as the signifier of marital availability. Usually, the protagonist doesn't have a compelling reason for opting out of his entire culture besides "He just knew it was wrong." You never put them through the process of examining that culture and evaluating it critically. And most importantly, you create a world where you use horrible things being done to some people as a way to shorthand "My character is a decent guy because he opts out of this terrible culture I created!" This is the most common approach, and it's the one I like the least because it's lazy.
The third approach is my personal preference, and it's best exemplified by Babylon 5 and the Song of Ice and Fire *novels*. You create a world in which racism and sexism and bigotry are real, and then you force your characters to navigate that world as decent human beings with the socialization they would have had living in it. Babylon 5 is notable for its frank address of racism, though they used nonhuman races for a broader view, so that it's less obviously a critique on modern culture -- but it still is. Because guess what? We live in a culture where some people think an accident of demographics makes one less worthy of basic respect and decency, so B5's constant struggle to blend disparate and sometimes incomprehensible cultures is a useful reflection of ways we ourselves often approach it. Some work, some don't, but you end up really thinking about it either way.
Game of Thrones' racial representation is problematic and there's really no way to handwave around it. I just have to say "Yes, there's some pretty blatant racism there and if I ever meet GRRM I'mma ask him what the hell he was thinking." But the books' sexual representation is much more nuanced and interesting. How does a decent person raised in a culture where there is no such thing as statutory rape navigate an obviously frightened and anxious child bride? The notable scene between Danaerys and Khal Drogo in the book involves a lot of nonverbal communication and shared pleasure until her comfort level allows her to consent -- and lays the foundation for their loving relationship. In the show, this was shorthanded to a painful, horrifying rape scene, which turns Dany's embrace of her culture and her marriage into an uncomfortable Stockholm-syndrome feel.
Tyrion's marriage to Sansa is another one of those nuanced situations. He's been given a beautiful bride, formerly betrothed to a king and conditioned since birth to be someone's lady wife, and commanded to bed her by a father who's displayed a consistent willingness to murder those who balk him. He tries; they get as far as taking off their clothes. At the same time, he's looking at this terrified child, whose father his family murdered in front of her, whose younger brothers and sisters are presumed dead, who's been a hostage for months, and he just...can't. Not because of her age, but because of the pure brutality of the situation and that he can't make anything good for her, just less horrible, and the least horrible option is "I won't touch you until you ask me to." Sansa displays a lot of character in the book there, first steeling herself to endure it and then mustering the courage to ask him, "And what if I never ask, my lord?" That chapter really seals her understanding that all her childhood fairy tale dreams are dead, that Tyrion Lannister is the only prince she gets. This is glossed in the series, as he just sends her to bed like a child and drinks himself to sleep on a sofa.
The last piece in this puzzle of the series failing the books is Jaime's much-talked-about rape of Cersei. In the book, it's an incredibly complicated scene that really demonstrates the complete dysfunction of their relationship. So much of their relationship has been grounded in that whole "It's wrong, but I want it, but I feel guilty, but I want it," on both their parts. In the series, it's...the creepy hate-rape of your sister next to your mutual dead child's corpse. This makes me as angry as Drogo's rape of Danaerys does. First, because hey, isn't there enough rape and brutality in the story without adding more?
Second, because it strips characters of a chance to develop. Jaime's long and conflicted arc of becoming a better human being, of overcoming the single stain of killing Aerys Targaryen, just stops right there. I can't see how the producers can possibly bring him back from this. Cersei's loss of agency and depth there just makes her another boring victim for another angry man. Drogo becomes just another savage possessing a woman who's been given as a gift, not a partner sharing joy with a fellow human being. Danaerys' subsequent transformation into comfortable khaleesi makes no sense. Sansa, who'd finally been beginning to develop past whining, becomes just another trial for Tyrion to manage (though the producers did keep the subtle beginnings of what might have been a long and comfortable friendship had circumstances not intervened).
It's a much more interesting story to watch people navigate complex situations than it is to watch them go through the motions of rebelling against the status quo and ultimately be destroyed by it. To say I'm disappointed that the shows are taking a lazy approach the books avoided is understatement.
On the whole, I've been pleased with the adaptations. I understand that in a book with hundreds of named characters, sometimes you need to combine a few or cut a few for the sake of a comprehensible story line. I understand that some storylines that interest me may be trivial to the outcome, just there for worldbuilding, so they might not make the cut.
But destroying one of the things Martin really did *right* by facing questions of sexual agency and power, and reducing those situations to rape and torture porn for shock value, is a grave disservice to the whole series, and to those of us who've loved it for years.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
I Am Not A Shepherd And These Are Not My Sheep
The longer you work in festival or convention safety, the more likely it is you'll run into the perception that the rest of the people, the ones not on your team, are somehow the 'sheep', who need to be protected. They are, as an aggregate, dumb and thoughtless and unable to make good decisions for themselves. I've heard them called 'gomers' and any number of other names, all of which imply that we, the safety staff, are the only thing standing between them and their messy, embarrassing demise.
This is, frankly, bullshit.
The first team I worked on held this perception. Perhaps it was a cynicism, or an egotism, but either way I'm faintly embarrassed now at the way I nodded, smugly, when it was explained to me that "We protect the people. Mostly from themselves." It was easy for me, because I only ever saw the people having trouble, to view those others as a collection of bad decisions and personal frailties waiting to happen. It was easy to view myself as a voice of calm reason and sanity to a childlike population. I bought into that particular line of patriarchy without even thinking about it.
As I began to consider my own warrior's path, away from my earliest influences, I evaluated my relationship with those around me. I considered how we would interact, what role I would play in their lives, and they in mine. It started to chafe at me, this perception of a mindless mass of helpless sheep. These are people, I thought, my equals and my peers. Together we form community, and together we create, sustain, and protect that community.
Over the last two years, as I've been training to lead my own safety services team, I've had a lot of time to think about how I wanted to lead and guide that team. What would we do? Would we be physical warriors, standing up bodily in the face of harm? Would we be spiritual warriors, focused on magical defenses and energy work? How would we protect the people?
The more I thought about my own history, and what I saw in it, the more I realised that I don't protect these people. Not in the traditional way. I protect this community, and that's something entirely different.
There is a part of it that is the taking up of arms, of walking into battle in the very real sense. That is a minuscule part of this commitment, but many groups treat it as the default expectation, a physical defense against a clear threat. They walk with swords and arrogance, looking for obvious battles, but when you begin by looking for a fight, you almost never find anything else.
No, the real work is elsewhere. To speak up with integrity in defense of those who do not feel empowered to speak. To model the actions you want to see in others. To choose empathy and compassion in the face of anger and confusion. To walk out among your community, opening doors and creating bridges, wherever you can. To be a resource for clarity and understanding. To build trust.
I consider what may happen, and how best to respond. I marshal resources and maintain, in my head, a list of people who can be depended upon to be calm and patient when it is needed, and fierce and passionate when it is needed, and who have the wisdom to know which is which.
The people of my community will usually, if given good information and the time to think clearly, make reasoned, intelligent decisions. When there is not time to think clearly, I have to call upon the trust that I have built rather than the authority I claim, to ask them to do something on my word because important things are at stake and I cannot stop to explain.
I worry, but with a plan. What is the worst that might happen, I ask myself, and then what will I do?
Through it all, I remember that I don't stand between these sheep and the wolves. I stand among these people. I am of them, and we are united in the future of this community. I am often asked why I'm so adamant about the difference between "I am on the safety team" and "I am on the security team." The difference is that the safety team is always thinking about the health and the safety of the community. They understand that flexibility and understanding are critical to the dynamic situations affecting the tribe. The security team simply enforces the rules, by force if necessary. There are too many instances of 'force' in that for me to be comfortable with it.
A shepherd protects and tends the flock, but he also culls it for his own sustenance. A sheepdog will ward against danger, but if it becomes hungry enough it will turn into a wolf in the blink of an eye.
A warrior walks among the people, of the people, and stands united with them for the good of all.
That is what I want to do.
This is, frankly, bullshit.
The first team I worked on held this perception. Perhaps it was a cynicism, or an egotism, but either way I'm faintly embarrassed now at the way I nodded, smugly, when it was explained to me that "We protect the people. Mostly from themselves." It was easy for me, because I only ever saw the people having trouble, to view those others as a collection of bad decisions and personal frailties waiting to happen. It was easy to view myself as a voice of calm reason and sanity to a childlike population. I bought into that particular line of patriarchy without even thinking about it.
As I began to consider my own warrior's path, away from my earliest influences, I evaluated my relationship with those around me. I considered how we would interact, what role I would play in their lives, and they in mine. It started to chafe at me, this perception of a mindless mass of helpless sheep. These are people, I thought, my equals and my peers. Together we form community, and together we create, sustain, and protect that community.
Over the last two years, as I've been training to lead my own safety services team, I've had a lot of time to think about how I wanted to lead and guide that team. What would we do? Would we be physical warriors, standing up bodily in the face of harm? Would we be spiritual warriors, focused on magical defenses and energy work? How would we protect the people?
The more I thought about my own history, and what I saw in it, the more I realised that I don't protect these people. Not in the traditional way. I protect this community, and that's something entirely different.
There is a part of it that is the taking up of arms, of walking into battle in the very real sense. That is a minuscule part of this commitment, but many groups treat it as the default expectation, a physical defense against a clear threat. They walk with swords and arrogance, looking for obvious battles, but when you begin by looking for a fight, you almost never find anything else.
No, the real work is elsewhere. To speak up with integrity in defense of those who do not feel empowered to speak. To model the actions you want to see in others. To choose empathy and compassion in the face of anger and confusion. To walk out among your community, opening doors and creating bridges, wherever you can. To be a resource for clarity and understanding. To build trust.
I consider what may happen, and how best to respond. I marshal resources and maintain, in my head, a list of people who can be depended upon to be calm and patient when it is needed, and fierce and passionate when it is needed, and who have the wisdom to know which is which.
The people of my community will usually, if given good information and the time to think clearly, make reasoned, intelligent decisions. When there is not time to think clearly, I have to call upon the trust that I have built rather than the authority I claim, to ask them to do something on my word because important things are at stake and I cannot stop to explain.
I worry, but with a plan. What is the worst that might happen, I ask myself, and then what will I do?
Through it all, I remember that I don't stand between these sheep and the wolves. I stand among these people. I am of them, and we are united in the future of this community. I am often asked why I'm so adamant about the difference between "I am on the safety team" and "I am on the security team." The difference is that the safety team is always thinking about the health and the safety of the community. They understand that flexibility and understanding are critical to the dynamic situations affecting the tribe. The security team simply enforces the rules, by force if necessary. There are too many instances of 'force' in that for me to be comfortable with it.
A shepherd protects and tends the flock, but he also culls it for his own sustenance. A sheepdog will ward against danger, but if it becomes hungry enough it will turn into a wolf in the blink of an eye.
A warrior walks among the people, of the people, and stands united with them for the good of all.
That is what I want to do.
Sunday, April 13, 2014
Shifting Anxiety into Clarity
Today I turned off a set of Red Cross notifications.
When I got my new phone, I set up my Tornado Alert Warnings to include the Kansas City and Lawrence areas, where I used to live and still have many friends. A few weeks into tornado season, I am struck by two things.
First, that I used to spend a substantial part of every spring fairly blithely living under the reminder of constant potential doom from the sky. Sirens once or twice a week wasn't that unusual. I formed the habit of making a mental note, in every building I regularly occupied, of the lowest and most sheltered ground. Each year I checked and repacked the small bag containing a change of clothes, some emergency cash, a flashlight and other necessities, without really acknowledging it as a tacit admission that I might face an actual tornado or have the roof blown off my apartment building by a microburst and need to grab the cat and run for shelter. In all that time, I never saw a tornado though the city I was in was hit more than once. I became blase about the danger because I was both used to it and personally untouched by it.
Second, that at some point in my life I created this fantastic and beautiful network of people, reaching across the country and around the world, and as a result my world has become very small. Today alone I am thinking of a shooting, tornado warnings, two children in my community facing illness, people facing the loss of loved ones, friends who are out of work, fearful for their futures, or worried about their own health.
Facebook keeps me in touch and aware, and e-mail, text, and messaging let me maintain a network of love and support. I have found that network a lifeline in my own daily experience, and I'm grateful for the ease with which an "I love you and you're in my thoughts," can fly hundreds of miles in a second.
But at some point, I have to unplug and hope I will hear what I need to hear as it happens. I turned off my notifications for Douglas County and Kansas City, not because I do not love the people who still live there, but because I cannot share their ever-present awareness of dangers that will almost certainly never come to pass. There is nothing I can do, except light my candles and hold fire and faith.
I was an Army Brat. I spent my childhood forming fast friendships with a changing population of peers, and then walking away with the knowledge that I might never see those best friends again. I've been running my adulthood that way, but now I keep the friends as an ever-expanding network of deep emotional connections.
But I'm having to refine and reframe the way I manage that network, all the time. A few years ago, it was evaluating my relationships and choosing to focus on the ones that supported and empowered me. More recently, I've been looking at a lot of my interactions and choosing to focus on those where I had a chance to change someone's mind or make someone consider a different viewpoint. Today, I'm choosing to step out of the reactionary mode, trying to give up that constant awareness of where my love and support will be needed next, and shift to simply giving it where it's asked.
To my gods I say, I am not abandoning my love and support for those who are important to me. I am not changing how I feel, or how deeply I wish for their happiness and success. I am simply pulling back my constant threat awareness and trading worry and anxiety in for the calm faith in love and community.
I love you all.
When I got my new phone, I set up my Tornado Alert Warnings to include the Kansas City and Lawrence areas, where I used to live and still have many friends. A few weeks into tornado season, I am struck by two things.
First, that I used to spend a substantial part of every spring fairly blithely living under the reminder of constant potential doom from the sky. Sirens once or twice a week wasn't that unusual. I formed the habit of making a mental note, in every building I regularly occupied, of the lowest and most sheltered ground. Each year I checked and repacked the small bag containing a change of clothes, some emergency cash, a flashlight and other necessities, without really acknowledging it as a tacit admission that I might face an actual tornado or have the roof blown off my apartment building by a microburst and need to grab the cat and run for shelter. In all that time, I never saw a tornado though the city I was in was hit more than once. I became blase about the danger because I was both used to it and personally untouched by it.
Second, that at some point in my life I created this fantastic and beautiful network of people, reaching across the country and around the world, and as a result my world has become very small. Today alone I am thinking of a shooting, tornado warnings, two children in my community facing illness, people facing the loss of loved ones, friends who are out of work, fearful for their futures, or worried about their own health.
Facebook keeps me in touch and aware, and e-mail, text, and messaging let me maintain a network of love and support. I have found that network a lifeline in my own daily experience, and I'm grateful for the ease with which an "I love you and you're in my thoughts," can fly hundreds of miles in a second.
But at some point, I have to unplug and hope I will hear what I need to hear as it happens. I turned off my notifications for Douglas County and Kansas City, not because I do not love the people who still live there, but because I cannot share their ever-present awareness of dangers that will almost certainly never come to pass. There is nothing I can do, except light my candles and hold fire and faith.
I was an Army Brat. I spent my childhood forming fast friendships with a changing population of peers, and then walking away with the knowledge that I might never see those best friends again. I've been running my adulthood that way, but now I keep the friends as an ever-expanding network of deep emotional connections.
But I'm having to refine and reframe the way I manage that network, all the time. A few years ago, it was evaluating my relationships and choosing to focus on the ones that supported and empowered me. More recently, I've been looking at a lot of my interactions and choosing to focus on those where I had a chance to change someone's mind or make someone consider a different viewpoint. Today, I'm choosing to step out of the reactionary mode, trying to give up that constant awareness of where my love and support will be needed next, and shift to simply giving it where it's asked.
To my gods I say, I am not abandoning my love and support for those who are important to me. I am not changing how I feel, or how deeply I wish for their happiness and success. I am simply pulling back my constant threat awareness and trading worry and anxiety in for the calm faith in love and community.
I love you all.
Friday, March 21, 2014
I Am Apparently My Own Bloodless Coup?
Over the last several days, I've been slowly wrestling with the possibility that the anemia is forever. That it's not a matter of making sure I get enough of the right kind of iron, that this is not a thing I can eat my way out of. That something is wrong with me beyond my ability to maintain my own health myself.
Two weeks ago, I had what I thought was the last hematologist appointment for half a year. Everything looked good, she said, hemoglobin and hematocrit numbers holding steady. My color is back, my energy is up. My hair and nails have been growing much stronger and thicker, my skin is better, and I just, overall, feel healthy.
Then, Monday morning, I got a call from the hematologist's office. My serum iron is in the 30's (normal is 50+) and my percent saturation is 9% (normal is 12). Four more infusions. Four more lost days of work. Four more trips to the chemo lab to sleep away three hours in a Benadryl haze. Four more anxious moments as I watch the first injection of the iron solution, knowing that if I have a reaction this door may be closed to me forever. Four more weeks of my body pulling energy away from cognition and motivation, to turn the glut of iron into healthy blood.
What the numbers mean, by the way, is that I'm walking a tightrope of deficiency. I have enough oxygen in my blood *now*, but one false step and I don't have the reserves to cover it. One bad nosebleed. One nasty cut while slicing vegetables, and I can't replace what will wash down the drain. And as the cells die, I'm at the very edge of being able to replace them.
Through it all, the anxiety. Is this just what my life is now? Semi-annual injections of something the entire rest of the world can get from a spinach salad or a hamburger? Watching for the pica, the shortness of breath, the cracked nails and the diminished energy, all the little ways my body tells me it's failing? Second-guessing every groggy morning and every brief moment of chill? Looking, every time I miss it, for a new metric that would have warned me? Accepting, after each episode, that that wasn't the right way to track it. Even a home iron test wouldn't have found this; it tests hemoglobin and hematocrit, which were fine.
Adding 'hematocrit' to my spell checker, because it seems I may need to be using it a lot. It suggests 'crematorium' instead. No, thank you, spell check.
The scariest thing a doctor can say to you is "I don't know why this is happening to you, and I don't know where else to look." I have no symptoms of deeper problems, no signs of cancer or internal bleeding or failing bone marrow or my liver gone rogue, mad with the power to destroy blood cells. That would be reassuring, except...I have no symptoms of anemia either, and I seem to have that.
Feeling simultaneously betrayed by my body, which is refusing to conform to the agreement we made in which I will give it good food and exercise and it will function as I need it to -- and compassionate towards it, because I can feel myself *trying* to compensate, to keep up, to do what is needed with what I have. It really doesn't help that within five minutes of the confirmation phone call, I started feeling cold and dizzy and weak. No, I told my feet, I can feel you just fine, dammit. This is psychosomatic and you KNOW IT so stop it!
The thing is, anemia doesn't kill you, because it's resolvable and treatable. It's not a thing people really die from, because iron is easy to replace, until it's not. Once you have a reaction to the iron treatments, your options become very limited. I've been in the lab, once, when someone started to have a reaction. He said, "It's swelling. It doesn't usually swell like this. Is something wrong?" I drifted into the Benadryl haze about that time; my last conscious thought was a panicked glance at my own injection site. When I woke, he was gone. I don't know where he went, or what his options are now. I asked, once, what if I can't have infusions any more? The nurse looked away and said, "Don't worry about that right now. Just focus on getting better."
The part of my brain I call Traitor Brain is having a field day.
"You're broken," she says. "You have bad blood. There are secret things wrong with you, things you should have seen, but now they're going to kill you and you're missing the significance of the only warning you're being given. This is your fault, for all those years when you couldn't get a job that gave you insurance. You'd already know what was wrong, but you were too busy being a fuckup to have the stability to find out."
She also says, "Get over yourself. This isn't a real illness. This isn't a thing. You know people with real things. They have real, bona fide illnesses and you're, what, a little chilly? Put on a fucking sweater and tough it up. Look around that fucking chemo lab and then say you're afraid with a straight face, that you're dealing with anything even close to what those people are facing. You should be ashamed of this, it's stupid narcissistic weakness."
I know that Traitor Brain is a bitch and she wants me to fail. That's why I named her that. I've had her on the run pretty well the last year or so, and she's trying to make me pay for it. I repeat her words here, because when I say them out loud I can hear how full of shit she is, but when she's hiding in my head, those insidious whispers are self-reinforcing.
There's another voice, too. It says, "Um, what if there's nothing wrong with you? What if this is just...how you are? How your body works?" I have started finding things on web searches that say that with steady hemoglobin levels, lots of women function fine with a serum iron in the 40s if they're not having any symptoms. That's not far from where I am. It's possible, remotely, that I am at a confluence of 'does not absorb iron well' and 'turns serum iron into hemoglobin VERY FAST' so that what looks like cruising disaster is actually my normal state of being, and my crises were triggered by something as simple as "eating a heavily vegetarian diet without noticing." This is where the lack of insurance comes in. I have hemoglobin levels from 10 years ago, and they were low, but I've never really had regular serum iron tests when I was healthy. I have no baseline, just the last several years of extremely problematic hemoglobin levels. And in the absence of that baseline, the doctor treats what she sees, and what she sees is blood on the dangerous edge. I'll talk to her about the possibility of it, and she's been very receptive, but "I think this may be an OK place for me to be as long as I'm careful" is going to be a hard sell.
I've wrestled with talking to the people in my life about all this, this week, but there are so many people who are important to me, that I knew I'd have to have this conversation too many times, and I'd forget things, or get angry when the same suggestion came from five people who didn't know I'd already addressed and considered it.
The long and the short of it is that while I've always considered my depression a chronic condition, it was something that I didn't really need medical intervention to manage. It's been something that just *knowing* about seemed to help. But this is the first time I have fully had to face the idea of the anemia as a chronic condition, one I must maintain with medical treatment, instead of an occasional one. I can no longer shrug it off as "I should eat more steaks!" and ignore the possibility that there is something to be concerned about. That's been really hard for me, this week.
And let me say one last thing: every hemogoblin joke, every Magneto reference, Every goofy picture of iron toys, every offer to staple things to me because "every little bit helps, right?" is a blessing. Making light of this is helping me, tremendously, navigate a very difficult and scary course. My twisted, disturbing, irreverent and loving friends continue to remind me that I have chosen to fill my life with the right people.
I love you all.
Two weeks ago, I had what I thought was the last hematologist appointment for half a year. Everything looked good, she said, hemoglobin and hematocrit numbers holding steady. My color is back, my energy is up. My hair and nails have been growing much stronger and thicker, my skin is better, and I just, overall, feel healthy.
Then, Monday morning, I got a call from the hematologist's office. My serum iron is in the 30's (normal is 50+) and my percent saturation is 9% (normal is 12). Four more infusions. Four more lost days of work. Four more trips to the chemo lab to sleep away three hours in a Benadryl haze. Four more anxious moments as I watch the first injection of the iron solution, knowing that if I have a reaction this door may be closed to me forever. Four more weeks of my body pulling energy away from cognition and motivation, to turn the glut of iron into healthy blood.
What the numbers mean, by the way, is that I'm walking a tightrope of deficiency. I have enough oxygen in my blood *now*, but one false step and I don't have the reserves to cover it. One bad nosebleed. One nasty cut while slicing vegetables, and I can't replace what will wash down the drain. And as the cells die, I'm at the very edge of being able to replace them.
Through it all, the anxiety. Is this just what my life is now? Semi-annual injections of something the entire rest of the world can get from a spinach salad or a hamburger? Watching for the pica, the shortness of breath, the cracked nails and the diminished energy, all the little ways my body tells me it's failing? Second-guessing every groggy morning and every brief moment of chill? Looking, every time I miss it, for a new metric that would have warned me? Accepting, after each episode, that that wasn't the right way to track it. Even a home iron test wouldn't have found this; it tests hemoglobin and hematocrit, which were fine.
Adding 'hematocrit' to my spell checker, because it seems I may need to be using it a lot. It suggests 'crematorium' instead. No, thank you, spell check.
The scariest thing a doctor can say to you is "I don't know why this is happening to you, and I don't know where else to look." I have no symptoms of deeper problems, no signs of cancer or internal bleeding or failing bone marrow or my liver gone rogue, mad with the power to destroy blood cells. That would be reassuring, except...I have no symptoms of anemia either, and I seem to have that.
Feeling simultaneously betrayed by my body, which is refusing to conform to the agreement we made in which I will give it good food and exercise and it will function as I need it to -- and compassionate towards it, because I can feel myself *trying* to compensate, to keep up, to do what is needed with what I have. It really doesn't help that within five minutes of the confirmation phone call, I started feeling cold and dizzy and weak. No, I told my feet, I can feel you just fine, dammit. This is psychosomatic and you KNOW IT so stop it!
The thing is, anemia doesn't kill you, because it's resolvable and treatable. It's not a thing people really die from, because iron is easy to replace, until it's not. Once you have a reaction to the iron treatments, your options become very limited. I've been in the lab, once, when someone started to have a reaction. He said, "It's swelling. It doesn't usually swell like this. Is something wrong?" I drifted into the Benadryl haze about that time; my last conscious thought was a panicked glance at my own injection site. When I woke, he was gone. I don't know where he went, or what his options are now. I asked, once, what if I can't have infusions any more? The nurse looked away and said, "Don't worry about that right now. Just focus on getting better."
The part of my brain I call Traitor Brain is having a field day.
"You're broken," she says. "You have bad blood. There are secret things wrong with you, things you should have seen, but now they're going to kill you and you're missing the significance of the only warning you're being given. This is your fault, for all those years when you couldn't get a job that gave you insurance. You'd already know what was wrong, but you were too busy being a fuckup to have the stability to find out."
She also says, "Get over yourself. This isn't a real illness. This isn't a thing. You know people with real things. They have real, bona fide illnesses and you're, what, a little chilly? Put on a fucking sweater and tough it up. Look around that fucking chemo lab and then say you're afraid with a straight face, that you're dealing with anything even close to what those people are facing. You should be ashamed of this, it's stupid narcissistic weakness."
I know that Traitor Brain is a bitch and she wants me to fail. That's why I named her that. I've had her on the run pretty well the last year or so, and she's trying to make me pay for it. I repeat her words here, because when I say them out loud I can hear how full of shit she is, but when she's hiding in my head, those insidious whispers are self-reinforcing.
There's another voice, too. It says, "Um, what if there's nothing wrong with you? What if this is just...how you are? How your body works?" I have started finding things on web searches that say that with steady hemoglobin levels, lots of women function fine with a serum iron in the 40s if they're not having any symptoms. That's not far from where I am. It's possible, remotely, that I am at a confluence of 'does not absorb iron well' and 'turns serum iron into hemoglobin VERY FAST' so that what looks like cruising disaster is actually my normal state of being, and my crises were triggered by something as simple as "eating a heavily vegetarian diet without noticing." This is where the lack of insurance comes in. I have hemoglobin levels from 10 years ago, and they were low, but I've never really had regular serum iron tests when I was healthy. I have no baseline, just the last several years of extremely problematic hemoglobin levels. And in the absence of that baseline, the doctor treats what she sees, and what she sees is blood on the dangerous edge. I'll talk to her about the possibility of it, and she's been very receptive, but "I think this may be an OK place for me to be as long as I'm careful" is going to be a hard sell.
I've wrestled with talking to the people in my life about all this, this week, but there are so many people who are important to me, that I knew I'd have to have this conversation too many times, and I'd forget things, or get angry when the same suggestion came from five people who didn't know I'd already addressed and considered it.
The long and the short of it is that while I've always considered my depression a chronic condition, it was something that I didn't really need medical intervention to manage. It's been something that just *knowing* about seemed to help. But this is the first time I have fully had to face the idea of the anemia as a chronic condition, one I must maintain with medical treatment, instead of an occasional one. I can no longer shrug it off as "I should eat more steaks!" and ignore the possibility that there is something to be concerned about. That's been really hard for me, this week.
And let me say one last thing: every hemogoblin joke, every Magneto reference, Every goofy picture of iron toys, every offer to staple things to me because "every little bit helps, right?" is a blessing. Making light of this is helping me, tremendously, navigate a very difficult and scary course. My twisted, disturbing, irreverent and loving friends continue to remind me that I have chosen to fill my life with the right people.
I love you all.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Of Course I'm Not Picketing Fred Phelps' Funeral, Whenever It Happens
For the last umpty-some years, when people have found out that Kansas is one of the places I've called home, they all want to know what I think about Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church.
So here it is, in all its glory.
He claims Christianity, but neither exemplifies nor accurately represents it to me. The Christians I know personally are people of thoughtful compassion, kindness, empathy, and love.
He may claim Kansas as a home, but he also doesn't represent Kansans to me. Aside from a few frightened and misguided souls, the Kansans that I know are practical, thoughtful, kind and honest people with a sincerely broken political culture and no real idea how to fix it.
He has, for much of my adult life, been a screaming voice of hate and anger. In recent years his church has become a caricature of itself, nothing more than a toothless tiger against which we take the opportunity to display our own defiance. As a unifying enemy, the Westboro Baptist Church has done more to unite pro-equality voices than any other single person or group, because they've consistently placed pro-military and pro-gay rights voices on the same side of a picket line, where they could find out exactly how much their love of freedom, peace, and courage overlapped. The Westboro Baptist Church has spent most of its history making its enemies into each other's allies.
Now, word comes that Fred Phelps, hated patriarch of the hated church, may be dying in hospice, excommunicated and scorned by the house his hate built. I know a lot of people smugly rejoicing in that knowledge. I'm not one of them.
Why not? A couple reasons. The first is easy: rejoicing at other people's suffering and misfortune isn't how I was raised. Feeling glad that people 'get what they deserve' always seems to end in *you* getting what *you* deserve, and I'll be the first to admit that on a strict judgment of good acts to bad in my life, I've probably gotten off more easily than was strictly fair. I'm grateful for that fact. If that means some others get off more easily than is strictly fair, then I'm OK with that too.
The second is theological. As a religious pluralist, I accept the validity of a variety of religious paths, including a variety of potential afterlife experiences. The one thing that remains constant is that you get what you believe is coming to you, but not on your own terms.
At the end of your life, I think you face whatever gods you called yours, to determine the next phase of your experience. And I believe you're given an understanding, at the end of life, of the near and far reaching effects of how you lived. How many lives you touched. How much of your world you changed. The good you did. The harm you caused. And rather than live to avoid hell or a bad reincarnation your next time on the wheel, I think the best choices you can make come from a place of "If you had to account for this to someone without lying to yourself about it, how would you feel?"
As to atheism, by the way, I'm of two minds. Either you cease to be, just as you always thought you would, or you're given the empirical evidence you always said would change your mind, and what happens next depends on how you change or don't change your perspective. Same with agnosticism; the real test is whether you were sincerely questioning and evaluating in a search for understanding, not whether you ever found the 'right' answer.
In any case, I think that at the end of your life, you get Answers from the universe and you may well be asked for them. And I don't envy Fred Phelps, as his days wind down, the conversation I expect he'll be having with his god. I don't envy him that moment of perfect understanding. I look at the possibility that he'll fully grasp the mark his life has made, the corrosion his hate has spread, the children whose spirits he destroyed, and I can only find compassion for what he's about to experience.
By all accounts, Fred Phelps is an abused child who grew up to be an abuser, locked into the cycle of abuse as victim and perpetuator, given power by religion and money and pure visceral meanness to spread his childhood damage beyond the usual reach. I'm glad on some level that his tormented days will end, and hope that after understanding what he's done, and facing all his harm, he can find some of the peace and forgiveness that he's denied for so long lie at the core of the Christian faith.
Because if he's judged as he has judged, what waits for him is far beyond any hell I can imagine. And whether it would be fair for him to find that hell or not, I fall back, like Marcus Cole, upon my faith in the general unfairness of the Universe.
So here it is, in all its glory.
He claims Christianity, but neither exemplifies nor accurately represents it to me. The Christians I know personally are people of thoughtful compassion, kindness, empathy, and love.
He may claim Kansas as a home, but he also doesn't represent Kansans to me. Aside from a few frightened and misguided souls, the Kansans that I know are practical, thoughtful, kind and honest people with a sincerely broken political culture and no real idea how to fix it.
He has, for much of my adult life, been a screaming voice of hate and anger. In recent years his church has become a caricature of itself, nothing more than a toothless tiger against which we take the opportunity to display our own defiance. As a unifying enemy, the Westboro Baptist Church has done more to unite pro-equality voices than any other single person or group, because they've consistently placed pro-military and pro-gay rights voices on the same side of a picket line, where they could find out exactly how much their love of freedom, peace, and courage overlapped. The Westboro Baptist Church has spent most of its history making its enemies into each other's allies.
Now, word comes that Fred Phelps, hated patriarch of the hated church, may be dying in hospice, excommunicated and scorned by the house his hate built. I know a lot of people smugly rejoicing in that knowledge. I'm not one of them.
Why not? A couple reasons. The first is easy: rejoicing at other people's suffering and misfortune isn't how I was raised. Feeling glad that people 'get what they deserve' always seems to end in *you* getting what *you* deserve, and I'll be the first to admit that on a strict judgment of good acts to bad in my life, I've probably gotten off more easily than was strictly fair. I'm grateful for that fact. If that means some others get off more easily than is strictly fair, then I'm OK with that too.
The second is theological. As a religious pluralist, I accept the validity of a variety of religious paths, including a variety of potential afterlife experiences. The one thing that remains constant is that you get what you believe is coming to you, but not on your own terms.
At the end of your life, I think you face whatever gods you called yours, to determine the next phase of your experience. And I believe you're given an understanding, at the end of life, of the near and far reaching effects of how you lived. How many lives you touched. How much of your world you changed. The good you did. The harm you caused. And rather than live to avoid hell or a bad reincarnation your next time on the wheel, I think the best choices you can make come from a place of "If you had to account for this to someone without lying to yourself about it, how would you feel?"
As to atheism, by the way, I'm of two minds. Either you cease to be, just as you always thought you would, or you're given the empirical evidence you always said would change your mind, and what happens next depends on how you change or don't change your perspective. Same with agnosticism; the real test is whether you were sincerely questioning and evaluating in a search for understanding, not whether you ever found the 'right' answer.
In any case, I think that at the end of your life, you get Answers from the universe and you may well be asked for them. And I don't envy Fred Phelps, as his days wind down, the conversation I expect he'll be having with his god. I don't envy him that moment of perfect understanding. I look at the possibility that he'll fully grasp the mark his life has made, the corrosion his hate has spread, the children whose spirits he destroyed, and I can only find compassion for what he's about to experience.
By all accounts, Fred Phelps is an abused child who grew up to be an abuser, locked into the cycle of abuse as victim and perpetuator, given power by religion and money and pure visceral meanness to spread his childhood damage beyond the usual reach. I'm glad on some level that his tormented days will end, and hope that after understanding what he's done, and facing all his harm, he can find some of the peace and forgiveness that he's denied for so long lie at the core of the Christian faith.
Because if he's judged as he has judged, what waits for him is far beyond any hell I can imagine. And whether it would be fair for him to find that hell or not, I fall back, like Marcus Cole, upon my faith in the general unfairness of the Universe.
Friday, March 7, 2014
I Think The Devil Can Speak For Himself
Right now, several states are considering or have recently considered laws that allow companies or government entities to refuse service on the basis of sexual preference. For many, this is a clear return to the days of Jim Crow policies and 'Men Only' facilities, which divided our access to services and advantages based on race and gender. It is a battle many people were pretty certain we'd already fought and won (at least from a legal perspective).
This is a complex issue for me. The debate covers the philosophical, the social, and the practical, and those opinions are in conflict.
On a purely philosophical level, I support icky speech. This means that I support the right of bigots to be bigots, the right of people to make hateful comments as long as they don't incite violence against others (the "gays are going to hell" vs. "Let's send some gays to hell" differentiation), and even the right of a business to decide whom it will and won't serve -- though I think anyone who wants to do so should have to post, on its door, a list of its bigotries so that I don't accidentally support someone operating from a place of hate. I believe that if people were required to own their bigotry, they'd fast find out it's not a very good business decision. I'm a firm believer in the idea that hate cannot long survive the sunshine. I'm also a firm believer in limiting the power of government to make decisions for businesses. I support environmental controls, minimum wage, employee protections, but I find myself balking at "You have to serve people regardless of your own philosophical position." If you don't want to make a cake for a gay wedding, I think that the hammer of government is too blunt a tool to make you; the scalpel of shame is far more effective, though slower.
However, when I consider it from a social level, I have to admit that I don't want the icky speech out there. The idea of people walking down a street filled with signs reminding them they're unwanted, or having to explain to a child "We can't have a pizza party for your birthday because they won't serve Daddy" is horrible to me. I have no legal justification for not wanting it, because "The law should protect you from hurt feelings and feeling excluded," is outside my acceptable scope of governmental operation. But I don't want to live in a society that deliberately agrees it's OK to make chunks of the population feel less-than. I don't want to be Those People, and I understand that it's very powerful and tempting to want to use the law to do that.
Ultimately it has to come down to the practical. The reality is that we don't have equal and consistent access to resources. 'Separate but equal' does not work unless both sides are really 'equal' and that's not possible in our current culture. It's a Catch-22 in that if we *did* have the access to truly equal resources and opportunities that 'separate but equal' assumes, we'd have had to get it by destroying the attitudes and structures that prevent it from existing, so there'd likely be no interest in the 'separate' part.
I'm watching a lot of people discuss this, and it's hard for me because I agree with positions that demand conflicting policies.
Philosophically speaking, a pharmacist shouldn't have to be forced to provide birth control if he believes it's harmful because there should be a pharmacist who will at a nearby store, and people should be able to vote with their dollars. Practically speaking, there are large chunks of the country where one person's choice in that matter has disproportionate power to reduce the choices and access of others. Philosophically speaking, your gas station shouldn't be forced to sell gas or bottled water to people you don't want to serve, and if people don't want to shop at a bigoted gas station there should be one nearby where everyone is welcome. Practically speaking, if it's the only gas station on a 100-mile stretch of I-10 through Arizona, that choice can be a matter of life and death.
Philosophically speaking, a state should be able to pass a law protecting the right to serve who you choose. Practically, several of those laws (especially in Kansas) interfered with existing federal law, including election law, and could not possibly stand a court challenge. They were used to smoke out moderate conservatives and divert the equality movement's attention and energy from marriage equality, which has taken on a juggernaut quality in recent months. Though the laws are indicative of attitudes, it's unlikely that they'll become real, implemented legislation. They're the flaily hand-waving of people desperate to retain control.
But here's the thing, and the reason I'm not participating in a lot of these conversations: it's all well and good for me to debate the role of government and the right of people to be assholes, and I'll admit I've let myself get pulled into the conversation a few times. But when I talk about it, for me it is abstract. My daily life is not affected by any of these laws, so it's a matter of pure theory for me.
I can't have the philosophical conversation without acknowledging that it's personal for a large chunk of the American population. We must have the conversation, sooner or later, about how much we want government to force us to play nice with one another. But, as Melissa McEwan points out, we should never forget that we're discussing the realities of people's lives, the practicalities of their daily experience, even if it's just theoretical for us.
What is for me a thought exercise in access, legislative reach, and the balance of social condemnation vs. legislative control, is for someone else the very real experience of "I wonder who I've been giving money to, who would rather I wasn't but couldn't refuse it." It's the experience of "The grocery store closest to my house has better prices than the one across town, but I wonder if the very Christian owner would take the opportunity to refuse me," of being told, in small and large ways, that your life is fair game for the judgment and approval of others, and that judgment and approval has the power to completely change the way you live.
And if I can't end the hate that feeds that experience in my lifetime, the least I can do is not trivialize it with Devil's Advocacy. Because, well, that's not actually a Devil that needs many advocates in the modern world; he's got more than enough already.
This is a complex issue for me. The debate covers the philosophical, the social, and the practical, and those opinions are in conflict.
On a purely philosophical level, I support icky speech. This means that I support the right of bigots to be bigots, the right of people to make hateful comments as long as they don't incite violence against others (the "gays are going to hell" vs. "Let's send some gays to hell" differentiation), and even the right of a business to decide whom it will and won't serve -- though I think anyone who wants to do so should have to post, on its door, a list of its bigotries so that I don't accidentally support someone operating from a place of hate. I believe that if people were required to own their bigotry, they'd fast find out it's not a very good business decision. I'm a firm believer in the idea that hate cannot long survive the sunshine. I'm also a firm believer in limiting the power of government to make decisions for businesses. I support environmental controls, minimum wage, employee protections, but I find myself balking at "You have to serve people regardless of your own philosophical position." If you don't want to make a cake for a gay wedding, I think that the hammer of government is too blunt a tool to make you; the scalpel of shame is far more effective, though slower.
However, when I consider it from a social level, I have to admit that I don't want the icky speech out there. The idea of people walking down a street filled with signs reminding them they're unwanted, or having to explain to a child "We can't have a pizza party for your birthday because they won't serve Daddy" is horrible to me. I have no legal justification for not wanting it, because "The law should protect you from hurt feelings and feeling excluded," is outside my acceptable scope of governmental operation. But I don't want to live in a society that deliberately agrees it's OK to make chunks of the population feel less-than. I don't want to be Those People, and I understand that it's very powerful and tempting to want to use the law to do that.
Ultimately it has to come down to the practical. The reality is that we don't have equal and consistent access to resources. 'Separate but equal' does not work unless both sides are really 'equal' and that's not possible in our current culture. It's a Catch-22 in that if we *did* have the access to truly equal resources and opportunities that 'separate but equal' assumes, we'd have had to get it by destroying the attitudes and structures that prevent it from existing, so there'd likely be no interest in the 'separate' part.
I'm watching a lot of people discuss this, and it's hard for me because I agree with positions that demand conflicting policies.
Philosophically speaking, a pharmacist shouldn't have to be forced to provide birth control if he believes it's harmful because there should be a pharmacist who will at a nearby store, and people should be able to vote with their dollars. Practically speaking, there are large chunks of the country where one person's choice in that matter has disproportionate power to reduce the choices and access of others. Philosophically speaking, your gas station shouldn't be forced to sell gas or bottled water to people you don't want to serve, and if people don't want to shop at a bigoted gas station there should be one nearby where everyone is welcome. Practically speaking, if it's the only gas station on a 100-mile stretch of I-10 through Arizona, that choice can be a matter of life and death.
Philosophically speaking, a state should be able to pass a law protecting the right to serve who you choose. Practically, several of those laws (especially in Kansas) interfered with existing federal law, including election law, and could not possibly stand a court challenge. They were used to smoke out moderate conservatives and divert the equality movement's attention and energy from marriage equality, which has taken on a juggernaut quality in recent months. Though the laws are indicative of attitudes, it's unlikely that they'll become real, implemented legislation. They're the flaily hand-waving of people desperate to retain control.
But here's the thing, and the reason I'm not participating in a lot of these conversations: it's all well and good for me to debate the role of government and the right of people to be assholes, and I'll admit I've let myself get pulled into the conversation a few times. But when I talk about it, for me it is abstract. My daily life is not affected by any of these laws, so it's a matter of pure theory for me.
I can't have the philosophical conversation without acknowledging that it's personal for a large chunk of the American population. We must have the conversation, sooner or later, about how much we want government to force us to play nice with one another. But, as Melissa McEwan points out, we should never forget that we're discussing the realities of people's lives, the practicalities of their daily experience, even if it's just theoretical for us.
What is for me a thought exercise in access, legislative reach, and the balance of social condemnation vs. legislative control, is for someone else the very real experience of "I wonder who I've been giving money to, who would rather I wasn't but couldn't refuse it." It's the experience of "The grocery store closest to my house has better prices than the one across town, but I wonder if the very Christian owner would take the opportunity to refuse me," of being told, in small and large ways, that your life is fair game for the judgment and approval of others, and that judgment and approval has the power to completely change the way you live.
And if I can't end the hate that feeds that experience in my lifetime, the least I can do is not trivialize it with Devil's Advocacy. Because, well, that's not actually a Devil that needs many advocates in the modern world; he's got more than enough already.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)