I have long struggled with my addiction to Twitter. I gave it up for Lent, then was right back on the thing as soon as it was "allowed" again. I spend approximately two minutes (not exaggerating) a day on Facebook and multiple hours--spread throughout the day--on the bird-platform. I've talked about it before, so I don't need to rehash old statements. The long and the short of it (#shakespeareiseverywhere) is that I prefer that social media to the Book of Faces.
One of the reasons that I like Twitter so much is that it gives me a chance to read from a lot of unexpected sources and get insights into what a lot of people are talking about. I've purged my follow list a couple of times, trying each time to focus more on what I really want out of the platform: Information regarding agents, writers, and goings-on in the world of my interests (teaching and publication and comic books and video games and Shakespeare and…and…). I do a poor- to fair job parsing down the accounts, then tend to accumulate more and more until I need to winnow again. It seems that time is upon me again. What's happening is kind of inside baseball (to use a phrase I know exists but doesn't make any sense to me), but the basic thrust is this: Comic book and book publishing are getting their turns in the sunlight, and it isn't a pretty sight. I don't buy a lot of comics these days--I don't buy a lot of anything, thanks to Ms. Rona--so I don't know exactly who's doing what and how they're abusing their power. However, this site helps put a finger on the reckoning that's going on. It isn't just comic books, either: The reason that I even found the aforelinked website is because a writer named Myke Cole and his friend (and fellow writer) Sam Sykes both are dealing with allegations of misconduct and abuse. I say allegations, but Myke Cole, during the heat of the #MeToo movement, wrote about it in February 2018--and it seems like he hadn't changed his attitudes or behaviors. I don't know the details of the newest stuff, but both he and Sam Sykes have been called out as perpetrators of sexual harassment. I own one book each from the two men, though I've never read them. (I'm a fan of ebooks in principle, though I tend to prefer non-fiction on my ereader, and since both of the purchases were electronic, well…) Their main interest to me was watching them banter across the internet in some decidedly hilarious interactions. Cole had a lot of worthwhile things to say about the recent protests, about how white supremacy usurps and twists historical concepts to serve their purposes, and the need for police defunding and abolition. Sykes had a number of insightful threads about the creative and writing process, and he was a great amplifier for artists whose work he liked. As far as I knew, they were just normal creatives on Twitter with books for sale. I guess I was right: They were "normal". And that's the problem. It's not hard (like, really not hard at all) to recognize that all people deserve to be treated as human, that their consent and preferences be taken into account when interacting with them, and that they should never be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Women in particular (and by that, of course, I include transwomen--because they're women, obvs--and non-binary people who rely on female designations for whatever reason) are human beings with equal rights, boundaries, and personal agency. Yet women in particular end up becoming targets of sexual harassment (and worse) far too often. Men, too, are put into compromised positions by others in power. It is an abhorrent reality that too many people face. The #MeToo movement helped show us how pervasive sexual misconduct (to put a too-polite word on the behavior) is within American society. Misogyny in any form ought to be anathema to, well, everyone. It has no place in our world. …except that it's here. It doesn't deserve to be here. It's like the divine right of kings: At best a relic of an antiquated age that needs no renaissance, at worst a tool that some may seek to remain in power for whatever personal gain they hope to achieve. (And lest you think that there aren't a lot of people who wish for a king in America, you perhaps haven't been paying attention to the loudest and most ardent followers of President Trump.) Misogyny (and its less-frequently seen sibling, misandry) shouldn't be in the world, yet it is. And we have to do something about it. No cancer is cured without intervention; no malady of humankind will go away without confrontation. There are lots of complexities in this issue, but the part that is most salient, I think, is a recognition of power. As cis-het White males who've been published, both Cole and Sykes are in positions that create a power imbalance. Power imbalances are inherent in our system--parent/child, teacher/student, politician/voter (in theory), employer/employee--and the differences in power positions is the area in which abuses are most likely to occur. The idea that an abuser can do heinous things and get away with it is one of the ways that these power imbalances become more and more entrenched. In the case of two published and visible (comparatively) writers, there's an additional power dynamic that a non-writer may not immediately see: Envy. I can't speak for other creative enterprises (though I imagine it's pretty similar), but in the writing community, aspiring writers are the most vocal and eager component of a fanbase. Book signings are often scenes of long lines of would-be writers hoping to get a bit of the signee's luck to rub off on them. The reason is pretty simple: It is extremely hard to break into writing. It's even harder to make a career out of it. And it's next to impossible to gain a wide readership. The competition is omnipresent and fierce. Going to a writer's conference is going into a place where the air has been replaced with desperation. Aspirants are desperate to learn something that will get them on the other side of the panel--to have "made it" and to be the one dispensing advice rather than writing it down. Published authors are desperate to keep their success going--to shill their books to the attendees and hope that the can earn out sometime in the near future. Editors are desperate to find someone whose work will provide a stable residual income for them; agents are desperate to strike a partnership with someone whose writing they love. Despite the fact that everyone is desperate, there are different degrees here. Power is strongest in the editors. They tend to be the ones acquiring the new talent, going to bat for the new books and new authors. This means that the editors have additional leverage over people who are desperate, and that increased power can far too often translate into heinous abuses. (A non-writing example would have to be Harvey Weinstein, who doesn't need any more thought spared to him.) Though neither Cole nor Sykes is an editor, they're both guys who "made it". They're one step closer to the dream. That means that people who might not normally accept an off-color or sexually suggestive remark will give a partial laugh and half-smile when it comes from an author that they like, or an agent they're thinking of querying. Richard Paul Evens learned the hard way that giving an unsolicited hug to fans can cross a line he didn't realize was there--and he did it, as the article says, probably "thousands of times". Were there thousands of victims? No. But there were some, and they were victimized because of the power imbalance. (Another example of this, though its effects are more diffuse: J.K. Rowling, despite having a lot of progressive concepts and values in her books, is a TERF, and she's recently come under fire for comments that dismiss transwomen. In this case, her power is less personal--she has an immense influence in the writing world, despite the fact that she isn't writing nearly as much as she has in the past--and it has turned into a flashpoint for a number of fans. So while you couldn't say that a specific person is harmed by Rowling's statements in the same way that the victims of Cole's or Sykes' behavior have been, there's still a kind of abuse that's happening here.) The results of these allegations have come rapidly. Cole has removed himself from Twitter for the foreseeable future; Sykes is insisting that victims continue to speak out. Everyone responds to this situation in slightly different ways. In my case, I remain in an uncomfortable crux that I've been in for many years now: What to do with the fact that human beings are behind so many of the things that I love. This isn't to dismiss the negative things that come from the embedded misogyny and racism that has built the world I live in. Being human means making mistakes, of course, but that doesn't mean that success should be deprived you because of those mistakes--but neither does it mean that second (or third or tenth) chances should be afforded, either. In some cases, it's a matter of reception. Milton and Shakespeare are near and dear to my heart and they're also emblematic of the Dead White Male that dominates the English departments. Eve in Paradise Lost moves between shockingly original and disappointingly dismissed. Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is a portrait of Stockholm Syndrome and one of the great tragedies in the canon, despite being a comedy. How can I maintain my feminist credentials, as it were, when embracing these two anti-women writers? Neither Milton nor Shakespeare can be "cancelled"--their presence in the world of letters is settled, at least during my lifetime. Their works are crucial to our modern identities, regardless of whether or not we recognize it. And I can't very well stop buying Milton or Shakespeare--they aren't getting royalties, and voting with my wallet will do nothing to their reputation. If economics is the barometer, the Bard and the prophet-bard are safe from reprisal. But what about Rowling, Cole, Sykes, or any other number of "problematic" authors who've done/said something that shows a sinister side to them that I can't agree with? My dollars will support Orson Scott Card if I buy his book, which means that I continue to empower a known- and proud homophobe. Is buying another round of butterbeer at Universal Studios only prolonging how long Rowling will be visible, pertinent, and capable of spreading her misconceptions about women? Now that I've purchased their books, is my continued non-reading of Cole and Sykes a way of boycotting them? And how is that different than the fact that I haven't gotten around to reading their books in the first place? These kinds of questions have been on my mind, as I said before, for years. And while I may have given examples that don't resonate with you. Maybe there are other views that these people espouse that you fundamentally disagree with--like Cole's calls to abolish the police. So you're okay with seeing his career end (will it, though?) or go on an unexpected and prolonged hiatus. You now will no longer buy books from a guy you weren't planning on buying from anyway. Have you done something to him? A creative's life is one of perpetual rejection (most of it's hidden, as authors don't stalk bookstores and feel personally offended when every patron who walked past her book on the aisle leaves without even picking up the book), so are you doing anything by boycotting his books? People talk about voting with their wallets all of the time--I used the phrase myself in the course of this essay--but I don't think it's quite as clear cut as we'd like to assume. After all, you may be able to buy a book from Rowling or Card or Sykes or Cole, but you could just as easily buy a book from Okorafor or Kuang or Chu or Kowal. All of these authors write in the same science fiction/fantasy genre, so why not pick one of these "less problematic" writers? Except you can't go to Hogwarts with Kuang and Okorfor's version of Ender is a Black girl named Binti, and does Kowal have as much fantasy violence in her books? In other words, you normally can't read one person's book and get the same story from a different author. So if Hogwarts means something important to me, something crucial, then I can't just go anywhere else. See? It's complicated… Or maybe it isn't. What's the difference between writers anyway? If you don't like one person's story, buy someone else's. Write your own books (which only makes sense to anyone who's never tried to write a book before). Don't do research into the humans who make your art. Don't expect them to abide by your own morals. Only buy from those who share your morals. Only retread what you've seen before, keeping your diet safe and vanilla, hypoallergenic and without surprises. Refrain from interpreting, interpolating, or interrogating the books you read--it's just fiction, it's just a story. No need to put anything else into it. I don't know how to square this circle. I bring it up from time to time in an attempt to get my feelings figured out, but it always slips free. I don't want to support people who've done harmful things. I don't want to give a pass to creators whose content I like simply because I like what they've made. I also have to acknowledge that someone has a problem with everything that I like for a whole host of reasons, so I have to understand what my own lines in the sand are…and what that says about me. Lastly, what this whole sordid tale exposes to me is the reality that I, too, have made mistakes. Never have I knowingly acted in a way that was intended to be inappropriate or harassing, sexually or otherwise. But that doesn't mean that I haven't been the reason someone felt unsafe or that I had ulterior motives in what I said or did. I know that there have been times--I can think of a couple--where brave women told me that what I was doing was making them uncomfortable. I immediately apologized and changed my behavior and that was the end of it. How many times have I inadvertently "shot mine arrow o'er the house, / And hurt my brother" (Hamlet 5.2) or sister? Lots of questions, I fear. And, as it happens so often for me, precious few answers. A year ago (exactly), I started the actual writing of a project that I've called Shadowed World (and I don't like the title at all; it's only a placeholder until something else occurs to me). I know I've mentioned it before, but as a refresher (saved you a click), here's the concept: Write five novella-length stories that introduce a particular world and the big problem facing the characters. Each novella would be twelve chapters long with an epilogue, and each novella could--theoretically--be read in any order. Part of this came because I had this random idea about giving readers control of how they read a book. My original concept was that an ebook format of the book could have the first five novellas randomized, thus giving a slightly different reading experience for the readers. Then a short novel--between fifty- and sixty thousand words long--would finish off the story. And, since I was imagining things and who's to put a stop on imagination, I though it would be cool if there were different print editions, again with the randomized order.
The whole idea was pulled off of the emotional fulfillment I got when watching Avengers: Endgame and so many pieces from the previous films came back. (I got this, to a lesser extent, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when things like the deluminator returns.) I mean, it's tearjerking when Tony Stark's kid wants a cheeseburger, because that's one of the first things Tony wanted when he got back from his sojourn in the Middle East. I figured there are a handful of really important components that allows for stories like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Harry Potter series to really succeed on an emotional level: Interesting and enjoyable universe; a blend of humor and seriousness; growth of characters; a mystery to keep things moving; spending time in the story with those characters. The last one is the trickiest one to do. Our hyperactive world struggles with long-form (remember the hullabaloo around Endgame's runtime?) storytelling. And, yes, I recognize that binge-worthy movies are all the rage, but I don't see people talking about wanting to binge One Piece (a six hundred-plus anime) or the different Naruto series (which also clock in around six hundred when all put together). While there are absolutely exceptions to this rule, I think those who are casually interested in a story (rather than hardcore fans who would devote entire days to the fictional world) are sometimes turned off by length. To me, short stories are too short: There's almost no time to develop a connection with the characters, and the plot's intricacies must be reduced. So I saw the problem of "spending time in the story with those characters" as the largest barrier to entry for writing a piece that has emotional connections with the audience. Fans of Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss thrill at the thousand-plus pages of those authors' mainstays. Stephen King can release a fourteen hundred page book (and even call it "horror", though it's almost impossible to maintain horror for that long) and it will go over very well (It will go over very well) because Stephen King has a cachet that assures his fans that the investment will be worthwhile…but I don’t have fans. I don't have that kind of goodwill. If I wanted to have an audience enjoy the stories yet still get some of those pieces, I needed to find a way to abbreviate that time commitment. Thus this project was born. Yes, it came out of my interest in the worldbuilding style of Overwatch and Innistrad, but it took its own form in the telling (as it ought to). I dreamed up a magic system, different races with separate characteristics (though, to be honest, they're pretty standard fantasy fare), and a broad problem that would pull these five characters into the orbit of each other by the end. The hardest part of the entire thing was the connections between the characters. Some of them knew each other from previous experiences, but for the most part, they don't interact during their separate novels. For example, my favorite character of the whole thing is a lynx-human (think Cowardly Lion but smaller and less prone to singing…or being cowardly) named Zelkie. Her story starts off with trying to pickpocket someone. A bit later, she sees a guy who is murdered. Before she can flee the scene, a different guy shows up and distracts the murderers. Well, the woman that Zelkie tried to pickpocket is the main character in a different novella. We read about the attempted robbery from Zelkie's point of view in Book I, then that same moment from the point of view of Kenz'Lor in Book IV. The murder happens in front of Zelkie in her novella, and then we see how Renkryth feels about it in Book V. Because I have five novellas, I outlined them specifically so that each character connects with all of the others at least once. I have no idea how successful this will be: My writer's group is meeting less and less due to COVID-19, and though we still talk about our chapters, it's a very long process to get any sort of reliable feedback. And, since there's so much time between my friends' readings of the first novella, I don't know how much will stand out in their minds and give them the "Oh, I remember this!" feeling that this whole project is supposed to excite. Though I wrote a lot of outlines (a lot of outlines; I've never had a book laid out this carefully before), I didn't get started on the actual drafting until my writing group's summer retreat, 13-15 June 2019. I wrote one entire novella during those three days. During the weeks between that retreat and my own personal retreat in mid-July, I wrote two-thirds of the second novella. With the time given for my personal retreat, I finished the second novella as well as starting the third. I finished that, also whilst at the cabin writing retreat (I get a lot written when I don't have family or the internet to distract me). I picked at the fourth novella throughout the second half of 2019. I knew what was happening in it--outlines help with that sort of thing--but I've struggled to write a lot of my own fiction over the past year and a bit. It seems like the only time I ever really have progress is when I'm on the writing retreats, because I wrote about 13,000 words in the fourth novella during a "winter" writing retreat a couple of weeks before the lockdown showed up. With that much momentum generated, I had finished the fourth novella by the end of March 2020. Since that time, I haven't done much with the story. The fifth one was always going to be the hardest because I had the least flexibility--at least, if I didn't want to have to flip back and forth constantly during editing to try to fix something. Essentially, I didn't want to have my early drafts be too loose; I wanted them to be considered as essentially canonical. The reason for this was simple: If I change one thing in, say, Book II, and that same event happens in Book IV, but from a different point of view, it will be really hard to keep those earlier changes consistent. An edit in one place could actually mean an edit shows up in two (or more) places. To cut down on that, I wanted the fifth story to form to what was already written, rather than the other way around. A day or two before my 2020 writing retreat, I went ahead and refreshed myself on the outlines of all previous novellas, plus the fifth one. I put all that I'd written into a single document to try to make it easier to find details (it helped, that's certain). That document is 240 pages long with over 140,000 words in it--so the CTRL+F function was used a lot. I tweaked some of my outline for Book V while still leaving room for the character to surprise me. At last, I was ready. I arrived at the cabin later than usual (not that it really matters, but my family was going to join me after I'd had four days to myself, so I was slowed down getting myself ready to go to the cabin), and had some of the least productive writing days, from a word count perspective, in years. The reason was that I had to do a lot of reading. I had to CTRL+F a bunch of stuff as I wrote, making sure that I wasn't missing important details. These weren't "I'll fix it in post" kinds of details: If I got them wrong, my entire fifth novella could have shifted off the rails. Nevertheless, I pushed forward. I went through my familiar routine that saw me writing by nine-thirty or ten o'clock, working into the lunch hour, then going for a walk/taking a break at some point in the afternoon before finishing off the last long leg of writing. This worked out well, and by lunchtime on my fourth day, I had finished the fifth novella. This is a major milestone for me: Not only did I finish Book V one year to the day that I started Book I, but I've been waiting to really move forward with the resolution novel (the Endgame component to this, if you will) until Book V was finished. I needed all of my pieces on the board, as it were, before I could strategize how to use each. Not only was it a matter of making sure that I knew the details of their story, I needed to get to know my characters. This might sound strange to non-writers, but coming to know who the characters are is one of the crucial components (and difficulties) of writing a story. Rarely do characters simply march into my head as a fully formed creation. Instead, they're accretions, slowly building up through details that I see in real life and I try onto them. Without that time with the characters, I didn't feel confident in moving into Phase Six (I guess? Or is it Phase Two?) of this project. Now that I've had that time, I think I'm almost ready to move on. I haven't put all of the novellas into one document yet, but it'll about 170,000 words and probably about 300 pages. I'm going to need to reread all of that, making notes (but not edits, because I try not to edit when I do a readthrough) and seeing how I can give each character her or his own unique moment in the team-up book. They'll have five or six chapters each…and how to balance all of that is something that's going to take time. This experience has, for the most part, been really positive. I'm excited to finish it, not because I think it will sell--let's not talk about my odds at getting published in a COVID or even post-COVID world--but because it's so ambitious. I've never tried anything like this, with this much interconnection and deliberate purpose. I've never tried writing in so many different styles, or remained so structured in my storytelling. For lots of reasons, declaring the novellas as being complete is rather overwhelming. And, who knows? Maybe I won't even start the "Big Book" until summer of 2021. It's certainly possible. Still, I feel like the amount of work I've done, the timing of it all (one year exactly!), and the fact that I'm not (yet) sick of the story are all good things worth celebrating. In my rereading of Shakespeare, I'm actually doing a couple of readings--that is, there are some gaps in my Shakespearean experience. Those gaps are the narrative poems. I can now, however, strike Venus and Adonis from the short list of "Shakespeare that I haven't read", as I finished the almost 1,200 line poem today. Wowza. That's what I think of this poem. Wowza. Since Venus and Adonis isn't particularly well known, let me give a quick synopsis for those who'd like to know: Venus, the goddess of love, wants to sleep with the most beautiful man in the world, Adonis. Adonis, a mortal hunter, is pretty much only interested in riding his horse and hunting a boar. When Venus shows up to get some action, Adonis isn't having it. She drapes herself on him, woos him with honeyed words, and basically does everything within her not-insubstantial power (she is the goddess of love, remember) to get him horizontal. Adonis doesn't care about Venus, her advances, or her arguments about why he should explore country matters with her, eventually riding away on his palfrey and abandoning Venus in the forest. When morning comes, Adonis is out hunting the boar, only to be gored mortally by the animal. Venus finds his body, weeps and mourns, then transforms him into an anemone. She then retreats to her domain to mourn the loss of the love that could never be. Admittedly, summarizing this story (which is from Ovid's Metamorphoses) doesn't do it much justice at all. The source material isn't quite as lengthy (from my dim memories of reading Ovid seven years ago) as the poem itself, and though there's precious little plot, Shakespeare manages to squeeze about 1,200 lines in this "remake". And, as is often the case whilst looking at the Bard's writings, how Shakespeare tells his stories matters more than what happens in the stories. First of all, Shakespeare uses a popular rhyming pattern--ababcc--in what is officially called sesta rima. However, much like the English sonnet format that now bears his name, this kind of rhyming is known as "Venus and Adonis stanza" based upon its association with our Sweet Swan of Avon. The rhyming can be plain (he rhymes "rest" and "breast" quite a bit) or daring (starting on line 1141, he rhymes fraud/o'erstrawed and breathing-while/beguile), but it's always in that effortless manner that Milton described as "easy numbers flow". Shakespeare, who wrote this poem during the plague outbreak of 1592-93, uses his poetry to woo some patronage from the Earl of Southampton by exercising his virtuosic talents on the page. While we aren't much for narrative poetry these days (or much of anything that isn't firmly lyrical poetry), it doesn't take too long before the artificiality of iambic pentameter in the rhyming quatrain/ending couplet starts to feel natural and comfortable. I don't really conceive of this as Shakespeare showing off, necessarily; it's more of an extension of his ability off the stage and onto the page. What really stood out to me, however, was the reversal of expectations. Shakespeare does this a couple of times in his plays, too, but it's a really sustained look at the wooing conventions of the time. Helena, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, laments the gender roles' rigidity: "We cannot fight for love, as men may do; / We should be wood and were not made to woo" (2.1.241-2). This small aspect of that whole play is the entirety of the tension of Venus and Adonis. The goddess of love comes into Adonis' life and expects that this mortal man to react "normally" when she comes on to him. Adonis, however, will have none of it, wishing that she would just leave him alone. The roles of the spurned lover and the uninterested object of affection are stereotypically male/female. Venus and Adonis shifts that binary, and I have to admit, it's amazingly effective. Surely part of the reason I felt this way is through my own experience being conditioned that men like physical affection and women occasionally dole it out. This kind of thinking isn't exclusively for intercourse, either. I come from a really conservative background--prudish would be too gentle a term, I think--where simply asking someone on a date was almost entirely the purview of the male. Dances like MORP were fun in part because of that reversal--the girl asked the guy. Here's a poem where the most attractive woman in all of existence is literally throwing herself onto a guy, encouraging him to kiss her, to experience her (and some of the ways that Shakespeare frames these "requests" are almost blush-inducing, despite not being particularly explicit), and what does he do? "Nah. I'm good." I think someone who was better at queer theory could make a case about Adonis' asexuality, but that was definitely something that came to my mind, in part because the question of "Why would you not?" kept rattling around my head. Fortunately, the text answers this, at least to a certain extent: He'd rather be hunting, he's supposed to be with his friends, and he's far too young for a tryst in the forest. What stood out the most to me was his delineation between lust and love--a line that I try to help my students understand every year. What have you urged that I cannot reprove? For a young guy who claims he doesn't know much, this is some pretty sound understanding. He rejects Venus' frequent arguments that he is being selfish by not making a copy of himself for others to enjoy--that beauty unshared is a beauty lost. This is an argument that recycles throughout Shakespeare: His sonnets are replete with this concept, and there's even an interesting exchange between Helen and Paroles in All's Well that Ends Well (1.1.105-151). In it, Paroles argues that virginity is "against the rule of nature" and only through losing virginity can more virgins be made, all of which mirrors and expands on Venusian arguments in this poem.
I have to wonder what Shakespeare was hoping would be the takeaway/effect on people as they read this poem. Did he want them to look at gender roles and say, "Wait, why is it this way?" Did he hope they would reconsider the yearnings of the flesh and be more thoughtful in their desires? Was he interested in "natural" copulations (Adonis' horse runs off to mate with a young mare part way through the poem) and wanted to juxtapose them with "unnatural" ones? Androgyny was a coveted aspect for a person during his time: Was he expressing his own culturally-accepted type of homosexual attraction? Elizabethans didn't think a man could be raped, so was this poem supposed to be a story proving that hypothesis (since, despite all of her physical attractions and even rolling on the ground with him, Adonis never gives in)? I don't know. All of these are possible, or none of them. Paradoxes abound in the poem, done (I think) to make the reader recognize the impossibilities of certain situations. The story of Venus and Adonis is supposed to be, to an extent, a paradox, too. And if that's the case, then it's not really something we're supposed to be able to reconcile. However you take it, the poem is fascinating and worth reading. I always encourage people to read more Shakespeare, but the length of his plays can be a bit of a barrier. Maybe a narrative poem or two could fill you up? Pass a pleasant hour or two in the forest with a goddess and her unwilling object of devotion? If nothing else, it'll make you think. In order to earn an endorsement for the history class I was hired to teach early in my career, I took a class on early American history. The text book itself was a single volume covering the entirety from a bit about Mesoamerica up to the 2008 election. It was the last section that really stood out to me: Seeing a watershed event like the 2008 election and the Great Recession written down as if just another chapter in a history book was kind of strange.
Amazing how much has changed in a dozen years. Future history books are going to have quite a time trying to conceptualize all that we've experienced lately. It might easier, on one hand: YouTube, social media, and a digital record of ever expanding depth will allow for documentation unparalleled in the history of the human experience. On the other hand, that quantity of information is impossible to sort through, contain, or do justice to. What's omitted from history books is sometimes as instructive as what's left in. When the experience of 2020 is complete, what will be remembered? Australian fires? Presidential impeachments? School dismissals? Pandemic deaths? Pandemic protests? Black Lives Matter? Peaceful protests? Police riots? William Barr's abuses of power? Rumors about Senator Lindsay Graham's sex life? A handful of memes? The list can go on and on…and we're only in June. Of all that's there, the question that lands closest to home is the one about school dismissals. What does it mean to restart school in the fall of the hell-year known as 2020? Though I tend to avoid the Wall Street Journal, this article they posted about the failures of remote learning caught my eye (and my click). There's plenty to unpack here. First of all, perhaps a few questions about the goal for the final quarter of the school year. What did people expect from crisis schooling? Did parents/students think to have a parallel experience to in-class, in-school instruction? Were students dismissed mid-March with a promise that their education would not be impacted by this catastrophe? If so, then remote schooling definitely didn't work. And, as an educator, I didn't think that it would. However, if one's expectation was that the students would still be presented with some of the curriculum, some of the opportunities to increase their skills, some of the knowledge that they would otherwise have gotten, then it did work. Honestly, if a parent thought that helping their kid from home with their school work was going to be the exact same as when the kid was actually at school, that's on the parents' failures. I wasn't teaching my classes--I was trying to help my students learn something. That's it--and that's not even what my normal goal as an educator is. Education has a lot of problems. One happens to be that there's a huge amount of assumptions and traditions that mandate the way that we operate. In Utah (the only state I've taught in, though much of the US is similar), we have a certain quantity of school days (180) that must be held, as well as a certain number of in-seat hours (990) that are expected. When you consider that 180 days out of 365 isn't even half of the year (despite having two thirds of the calendar), it quickly becomes apparent that something doesn't quite match up. We assume our students are in school for nine months; our traditions (multiple three-day weekends, Fall and Spring Break, Thanksgiving holiday, Winter Break) actually change that. In my school, with the different schedules for finals, our three-week intensive called Winterim, and these traditional school breaks, I have approximately 42 days (not counting regular weekends) wherein I don't work with my students and the regular curriculum. This doesn't count the 90 or so days of summer break. This is the system that I grew up with. It's the one that I've always taught in. I'm not (necessarily) advocating its change. I'm instead pointing out that when we think of a school "year", our calendar says something quite different from the actual in-class experience. If someone were interested in shifting around any of these scheduling concepts--say, to reduce the amount of time during summer break, or having shorter days over a longer time period with fewer breaks--there's a lot of ossified tradition to overcome. Many parents (and I include myself here) look forward to the summer break as a chance for family trips, relaxed schedules, and long-standing activities. Childhood is tantamount to summertime (and Christmas, I'd think, for many) in the minds of a lot of adults, and it's only fair that they want to share those beloved moments of their youth with their children. So changing that in a widescale way is working against the current on almost every level. What we expect through this (and other academic traditions) is that our children will come out on the other end educated. And, for the most part, I think this can be a successful plan. While it isn't ideal, the reality is that we have a highly literate society (in that we can read; whether we can process ideas and think about what we read is a different discussion) and our education system can find and refine a lot of talent. But its success isn't predicated on that it exists: It's based upon the way we educate. It's no surprise that when we change the way we educate, we don't get the same kind of successes. One of the educational buzzwords (which has faded in my dozen years of teaching) is "backwards by design". The principle is a good one, I think: You consider what you want a student to be doing at the end of the unit, and then work backwards to see how to get them there. Kind of obvious, isn't it? Yet it's not unusual--at least, in my experience--to think, Hey, I'd really like to teach this particular topic…and then fail to figure out what the ending looks like. The default for many is a test--something that does a good job of measuring how well a kid does on a test--but maybe an essay? A handful of problems with answers in the back of the book? If, however, the educator knows what the ending looks like--the kid understands how to use MLA citation in a paper, let's say--then the beginning is pretty straightforward and sets the kid down the correct path. The end of the year for me is absolutely by design: I have a specific goal and emotional conclusion that I work all year to arrive at. That's how my class works. But it can't arrive at the ending I've designed if the course shifts abruptly and permanently. Did my class "work" the way I expected it to? No, of course not. How could it? Its entire output was predicated on an input that I could no longer do. I think that's what's stuck in my craw about the WSJ article. Not a single regular teacher set out in August 2019 with the expectation of concluding a full quarter of the school year in a remote learning environment. We weren't designing for that endpoint. It could never work for that reason. But what did work? Schools limped on, of course, struggling to figure out how to balance everything from everyone. We did provide content to students--who may or may not have done what was asked of them. Students weren't homeschooled--they learned at home. Any homeschooling parent worth their salt could tell you the difference. And that was something we did with about two days' preparation. This is not to toot my own horn, but to instead contextualize the effort that was required. Normally, a teacher will spend an additional two to four hours a day (roughly averaging and making generalizations) figuring out lesson plans, grading assignments, and preparing for the next day's work. By breaking the needs down into smaller, daily chunks, we're able to remain flexible (in case something didn't work and needs fine tuning the next day) yet not overwhelmed. I make it sound tranquil, but for many the process of teaching is very much laying down the track as the train comes running up from behind. The longer a person teaches the same curriculum, the easier it is to know what she's doing at any given time. This is where innovation and improvisation can come in, as the teacher's skill in the curriculum allows for deviations that weren't possible before. All of this can be implemented in a steady, consistent manner (not that it always is), and the teacher is able to course-correct as needed. By being with the students on a daily basis (in my case; obviously, block schedules are a thing), teachers are able to see what went wrong in their own delivery, where students were confused, and maintain their own sanity by not having to repeat themselves sixty-plus times. That is the process that, via assumptions and traditions, we have constructed as teachers (with the obvious caveat that every teacher's experience is different and unique so mileage may vary). That's how we work. It allows a huge amount of autonomy, as fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants teachers are able to crank stuff out in time for class, while pre-planned-for-the-past-six-months teachers have their routines to keep their ships sailing. Now take all of that skill, intuition, preparation, and planning and demand a new way of delivering content, all within two days. That's what we teachers ended up having to do in mid-March 2020. In my case, I said goodbye to my students on Friday, and some of them I haven't seen since then--and summer has arrived. I now had to figure out how to explain my curriculum, how to encourage participation in discussions, how to communicate my expectations, all on an ad-hoc basis with sundry schedules over which I had no control. Posting an assignment online is not the same as telling students, in person, what I expect of them. The goal of the last quarter was not to deliver my planned content: It was to support student learning in a crisis. That's what I did. And, as far as that goal is concerned, it was successful. Almost all of my students went through and learned something because of what I did. None of them learned what I wanted them to learn--the end point was frustrated--but they didn't not learn. When we ask if teachers failed, students failed, or the system failed, the answer is obviously "Yes" to all three. However, that's grading with a rubric that doesn't fit anymore. We did not make the most out of a less-than ideal situation, but neither did we fail to do our jobs. We did the most with what was available to us--a technique that, especially in Utah, we have been forced, time and again, to utilize. Despite the best efforts of me and millions of other teachers out there, students on the whole are at a lower place in their educations than they would be in a typical year. That much I agree with, and the graph in the WSJ article is a disheartening one. We educators are well aware of the loss of educational progress that happens over a three-month summer. For some students, they're going through a six-month break. Their learning is going to be hampered, potentially for the rest of their academic life, because of COVID-19. This is a tragedy that's going to take years to heal. I will say, though, it's certainly possible that we can make some lemonade from the lemons of the academic year 2019-2020. But I'll save that for a different post. Note: Mormonism is capable of sustaining a lot of different views and attitudes; what I have almost exclusive contact with is the Utah County variety, which is its own unique brand of the religion. Additionally, I'm speaking from personal, lived experience and perceptions that I have received. Others who've been a part of this religion as long--or longer--may remember and view things differently. Obviously, I'm speaking for myself and not for the Church itself, and there are plenty of people who feel differently than the mainstream Mormonism I'm painting here. Exceptions to what I'm discussing here are what give me hope.
I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--a Mormon--and I don't view politics the way the majority of my local congregants do. If I had to peg my personal concepts of Mormonism, they'd probably be closer to an LDS liberation theology than where many might expect a Mormon to land. Like any honest seeker of truth, my understandings of the world shift and change as new information comes in. My feelings and ideas also change--there was a time, for example, when I believed that global warming was a hoax, simply because I thought that I was a Republican, and Republicans denied the clear scientific evidence--and so I'm writing this not as an endpoint of my thoughts but rather one that's spurred by recent events and disappointments. It's part of my own journey. What I'm doing here is trying to answer the question that I found in comments to one of Pat Bagley's tweets (which is funny and, to only fuel the irony of this post, I'm linking to but not sharing outright because it has swears and, as a Mormon, I've issues with that). In it, Pat "translates" Evan McMullin's tweet which expresses his disgust at the police brutality against a senior citizen in the recent police riots. Within Bagley's comments is the one I have as the image at the top of the post, from @the_real_scott: "Speaking of Mormonese, I can't understand the Mormon ease in voting for something that is antithetical to everything they say they believe morally. I really don't get how they support Trump's lies, crimes, and overt racism." Good wordplay there, and it shoots straight at my own questions about how Mormons feel about the impeached president. First of all, the majority of Mormons seem to be okay with President Trump. Despite his bragging about sexual assault--revealed before the election happened--his impeachment, and any other catalogue of horrors and abuses, Mormons are poised to vote for him again in November, based upon polls taken at the end of May 2020. And though they've not loved him the way Mormons usually kowtow to Republican presidents, they still abide his presidency by almost two-thirds majority. (Admittedly, that particular stat comes from 2018, and opinions can change.) In short, the impeached president's bragging about murdering someone on 5th Avenue has, metaphorically, held true with the majority of members of the Church of Jesus Christ: Despite his clear disdain for religion--using it as a prop to shore up his Evangelical base--as well as his frequent maligning of Mormon-favorite Mitt Romney, President Donald Trump remains popular among the pious. It should be clear, if it weren't yet, that I view the impeached Donald Trump as a danger to our country and a "king of shreds and patches," to quote Shakespeare. He took a position he was not qualified for, put in office against the wishes of the majority of voters, and has done a worse job as president than I anticipated--which is really saying something. As a human, he's undignified, incapable of coherent thought, and an embarrassment. And, as much as it might pain him to hear it, for Mormons, I don't think it's about him. For some members of the Church, it wasn't about Trump; it was about his competition. To many Mormons, voting for Trump (which both Mormon-heavy Utah and Idaho did in 2016) was more about voting against Hillary Clinton, whom they viewed with suspicion (at best) and outright hostility (at worst…and at more normal levels, from my experience). It feels like much of the AM dial in Utah is dedicated to conservative talk-radio, and talk-radio notoriously despised Clinton, whom they viewed as an Obama-surrogate (among other things). Right or no, the perception of Clinton as somehow even worse than President Obama was definitely part of the milieu in Utah County circa 2016. The case against Clinton was manifold, but the one that I heard a student say that continues to haunt me is that she was "overqualified" to be the President of the United States. And, of course, the sarcastic catchphrase of the election: "But her emails!" was viewed, not as conspiracy-theory bleating, but a coup de grâce about voting red. Abortion is a flashpoint for a lot of members of the Church: The Church is opposed to at-will abortions, so voting for a candidate who embraced the continued legalization of abortion was a non-starter. Marriage, another bastion of Mormonism and an area where the Church feels constantly threatened, was brought up against Clinton. I saw people deride her for staying with the impeached Bill Clinton, despite his highly-public affair. I also heard people use the idea that Bill was a rapist, and therefore Hillary should not be president. (I haven't heard if these same people were distressed by the sixteen allegations of sexual misconduct against 45 has changed their opinions on the toupee-wearing jack-o-lantern.) Trump is on his third wife, and has admitted to extramarital affairs--including a large-scale scandal with a paid-off porn star--but I've not heard much among my conservative friends about whether that has changed any feelings. Despite all of this, Clinton is no longer running (though I hear enough about both Clinton and Obama from conservative defenders of the impeached president that I sometimes wonder) and so voters for Trump no longer have to be his supporters, right? Well, this is where it stops being about Donald Trump, at least from what I can understand. It's not his personality, but his politics where a lot of Mormons align with him. Yes, on the whole, Mormons are opposed to Trump's stance on refugees--consider Governor Herbert's request at the end of 2019--and they aren't a fan of his blatant sexism (I guess; Mormons have a really strong definition of gender roles, but they don't like it when people are mean about those sorts of things). Really, it's more of a "hate the sinner, love the sin" sort of an approach. The death of Antonin Scalia--and the Supreme Court Justice seat McConnell and other Republican senators held unfilled until after the election was over--appeared to me as one of the deciding factors for a number of people: Better to have a spray-tan afficionado in the Oval Office and a conservative Justice than a competent Commander-in-Chief who would put a liberal Justice in place. And so we hit the paydirt of what Mormonism as a political force means. I personally think that the politics of Mormonism is divorced from the theology--as I mentioned before, I lean toward a type of liberation theology, rather than the prosperity theology that has been a part of Mormonic politics/culture for as long as I can remember--and that can, in part, be laid at the feet of President (of the Church) Ezra Taft Benson. His cold-warrior approach to the way the world worked in his time gave a lot of grist to the conservative movement, including his proclamations that the Constitution is a "heavenly banner". (I personally don't know that I want a banner in heaven that enshrines slavery, 3/5 personhood to Blacks, or busies itself with letters permitting piracy…but to each his own, I guess.) Don't get me wrong: I'm a fan of the Constitution. But I'm not a fan of thinking it as some sort of extracanonical scripture (that's what Shakespeare's for) that makes it sacrosanct and above reproach. President Benson wasn't alone in this--we've a long-standing love-affair with conservativism in Mormon history. Heck, BYU's no-beard policy comes in response to counterculture activism in the 1960s and the overall association of hippies and communists to looking less well-groomed, including the wearing of facial hair. What better way to show we're anti-communist than by keeping our faces clean-shaven? The point is, that since at least the mid-twentieth century, Mormonism and conservativism have been growing together. That, however, doesn't explain all of it… From what I can tell, Mormons really want to be a part of the Christian name brand. I wrote about my own feelings on this (before the Church came out and made it a verbal taboo to use the nickname "Mormon"), which haven't changed very much. However, part of my argument is that, aside from a superficial dictionary definition of the term Christian, Mormons aren't Christians. And we're definitely different from the evangelical strains of American Christianity. We members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints won't be accepted as part of the body of Christ. Though old, this article from Michelle Vu at The Christian Post really puts a finger on the issue when she quotes Dr. Richard Land's analysis. We're considered a fourth Abrahamic religion: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism. However, going it alone is hard to do, especially when there are areas of commonality--a love of Jesus, a hope to do good, a desire for divinity and a blissful afterlife--that make Evangelists appear like natural allies in a world we've been taught to fear, reject, and help save. The marriage of so-called "conservative values" and the Evangelical Right, along with its fusion to the Republican party, has created a web of loyalties and assumptions that Mormonic politics has embraced almost wholesale. This is, to finally get to the answer from @the_real_scott's original question, why Mormons are at ease with Trump. It isn't Trump that they're at ease with: It's the initial next to his name. It's the Republican party that Mormons like. Sure, there are plenty of instances of disagreement--after all, Evan McMullan snagged almost 22% of the electoral vote in 2016, showing a very strong resistance to picking Trump. In fact, McMullan is an interesting case, because it shows that some (quite clearly not all) members did take issue with Trump, but still wanted their conservative views intact. For them, they felt that they were presented with two evils, and so decided to choose neither.* Had those who voted for McMullan instead picked Clinton, Utah would have gone to a Democratic candidate for the first time since LBJ.** Of course, they picked McMullan because they wanted an alternative to the personality, not necessarily to the politics, of the GOP and Trump. From what I can tell, the reason why Mormons will vote for Trump again in 2020--and, since it's 2020 and everything is topsy-turvy, it'll probably be in higher numbers than four years ago--is because they have long considered conservativism as a shibboleth for their religion. The broad strokes of Evangelical politics and right-wing thinking have enough religious parallels that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will go along with almost any candidate with an R next to his (almost always his***) name. --- * I get the idea of voting one's conscience: I would argue that people's conscience should be, before "smaller government, lower taxes!", the moral "Don't vote for fascists". But that's just me. ** What's interesting to me isn't the infrequency of Democratic votes, but when they happen. In Utah's whole history, they've voted for five Democratic nominees in a total of eight elections. The remaining twenty-three elections all went to the Republican. And who did they vote for? Well, in the twentieth century, they went with Wilson--who won because he "kept America out of the war" and then sent Americans to war shortly after his second inauguration--before going along with FDR all four times. They even voted for his vice president. Utah didn't even vote for JFK, yet they helped rehire his vice president. I wonder if it had something to do with their perception of how the wars were progressing. I'd have to do more research, but I think that's fascinating. Oh, and did you notice how safe Utah is for Trump? There's no doubt that the Beehive State is securely in the impeached president's pocket. No doubt at all. *** Obviously, there are plenty of females in the Republican party and in the Utah political system. But there's definitely a preponderance of males. Also, the curious case of Ben McAdams versus Mia Love deserves more digestion than a footnote can handle, but it is absolutely worth mentioning that there is a Democrat from Utah in the House of Representatives. It's also worth pointing out that he ended up there because he had 694 more votes than Mia Love. And, to be honest, I was positively gob-smacked when I heard that McAdams won. The world is filled with all sorts of exceptions and unexpected turns, isn't it? This one is for me.
The reason is simple: Black lives matter, and Blacks and other POC are already aware of the faultlines [sic], the quicksand, the mires that they have to traverse. I would say almost all Black people know why the country is rioting. Anything that I would say to try to explain to a Black person why Salt Lake implemented a curfew, why Minneapolis is burning, why other places in the world are marching in solidarity would be condescending at best and insulting at worst. This isn't about explaining why the riots are happening, even in my home state. This one is for me to try to understand how a White person could ask, "Why is this happening here?" "The guy who killed George Floyd was arrested. Why are they rioting?" "George Floyd died in Minneapolis. Why is there a burning car in Salt Lake City?" The permutations of the question are legion but the gist is always the same: How can someone else's problem be spilling into my life? It's hardly a unique observation to say that 2020 has been a pretty crappy year: Australia kicked the year off by losing 27 million acres to wildfires; the impeached president was not removed from office due to party loyalty rather than an attempt at an impartial trial; the impeached president botched a correct response to COVID-19 that has, so far, sent over 100,000 Americans to their graves; American schools dismissed mid-March due to the coronavirus, never rejoining despite reaching into graduation territory; an entitled White woman weaponized her tears in an attempt to get a Black man killed; and images of George Floyd's body was paraded around social medial and news networks as outrage grew over his murder. We're only half way through the year. While my list is far from complete--mass shootings, as often happen in America, haven't hit much in terms of the national consciousness, for example--it's a sharp reminder just how much has happened, and the election hasn't even heated up yet. White supremacy, in many of its forms, is on the rise (and has been for the past few years). The strains of extended lock downs and a failure to return to normal when many people (naively) hoped the pandemic would end are absolutely part of the equation, too. It has been a long, difficult year this week, and it doesn't look like there's much chance of a respite. The respair that we all hoped for by the arrival of the summer months appears to be misplaced. Speaking for myself and how I understand the world, there is an underlying expectation that things work out for a person. It comes from the egocentric view of the universe that we are stuck within, enhanced and encouraged by the nature of narrative--our stories are usually about a handful of characters (often just one or two) and we're encouraged to identify with them--and we rarely want to watch tragedies. People of faith hold onto that perfect brightness of hope with an understanding of their connection to the divine (in many traditions, including my own, it's a filial line) as the source of their strength. When good things happen, it's to the individual; when bad things happen, it's to others. And, if the bad does happen to them, it's temporary. This is why it's so shocking when something goes continuously, catastrophically wrong. It's like winning the worst kind of lottery. Sure, we all have our trials and hardships, but they're part of our lives. The fridge breaks down? Of course it does: We're in a pandemic. The difficulty is real, the problem must be solved, but the questioning--Why did this happen to me?--remains unanswered. Hence the reason we crowdfund our miseries: Everybody has something happen to their sprinklers, computer, garage door, washing machine…whatever it is. These minor inconveniences of life are tangential. But, like all tangents, they do ultimately connect to another line. I am on the easiest setting in this video game called Life: I'm a cis-het married male, college-educated middle class, within the locally predominant religion. I'm also White. The only thing I'm missing from a blackout on the Bingo Card of Luck is that I didn't inherit wealth from my parents. (You could make a worthwhile argument that my Mormonism is also a handicap; not, however, in Utah, where being the opposite is.) I am a homeowner, relatively free of debt, and have a salaried job at a school I love. I am #blessed. I don't deny this--because how could I? Like, it's pretty obvious that I have it really good. I also can't claim much of my success on myself. I know that this flies in the face of libertarian doctrine and objectivist dogma, but it would be ridiculously naïve and self-serving of me to argue that I got here on my own. I built off of a foundation that my parents provided me. I met my future wife while we were juniors in high school--what did I do to put me in that school? Oh, yeah, nothing. That had nothing to do with me. And though my courtship and eventual marriage to the remarkable woman who is my wife had something to do with me, there are all sorts of components that were built into me that I did not install: My religion (which, if you don't know about Mormonic courtship expectations and rituals, you should ask me what it's like; rather different than how other people think about this sort of thing), my location, my sense of humor, my expectations for a relationship…I could go on. There are active things that I have to decide, of course--relationships require proactive work. But let's be honest, here: I've been draining half-court shots for most of my life without ever practicing. Let's look at some of the things that have happened according to my plans/desires:
Now let's look at the things that have not happened/worked out the way I expected:
I'm not trying to dismiss the last three: They're real and they continue to be a tender spot in my life. I could go on about what those three "failures"* mean to me, but the broader point is this: I live a charmed life. (Remember, this essay is for me.) I know a handful of Black people and some POC--mostly students--and I know that, while they, too, are benefiting from a lot of great perks that are outside of their control, I know also that they still deal with a pernicious cloud of racism that will always be a miasma in their lives. I wake up every day as Steven Dowdle, first and foremost. Other roles, other responsibilities flicker onto me rapidly--father, teacher, husband, driver, adult, whatever the day requires. But I never have to look at my white face in the mirror and wonder how it's going to endanger me. I go to sleep White and I wake up White and the result of that is that I don't have to think about my Whiteness. I don't have to gird up my courage to leave the house (though we know that Black people aren't safe from cop killings inside their own houses…not in America; they can't even unlock their front doors without it becoming a presidential problem). We recently had some fridge problems. We contacted a company and they sent out a representative. Gayle received a text the day before with a picture of our repairman--a fellow named William, I believe. A large, friendly Black man, he arrived the next day within the expected time. He wore a mask--which I appreciated, and did the same when near him as a matter of courtesy, respect, and common human decency--and kept himself limited to the kitchen as he diagnosed the problem. Once some parts came in, he returned a different day and finished up the work. He did a great job--our fridge is running fine and now we don't have to worry about spoiled milk or a broken refrigerator during a pandemic. I have to wonder what William worried about when he came to our home. Was he concerned that the woman of the house hadn't told her husband about the refrigerator repairman coming? Did he worry that I would come home from work while he was there? Did he fret about whether or not we had a gun in the house? Did he think that we were suspicious of him? Did he assume that we had hidden our valuable things so that he wouldn't rob us? Was he concerned about his safety on the way to our house, on the way back? Did he check his taillights to make sure they worked so that he didn't have to worry about being pulled over? Does Javon Johnson's reminder about the speed of hand to wallet echo in William's mind? And, if you're operating on the easiest level on the video game of life, you can ask yourself this: How many of the questions I wrote above have crossed your mind when visiting a stranger's house for whatever reason? I knocked on countless doors in Miami, Florida and those types of questions almost never surfaced. This was because of the naïveté of my age, an innocent faith, and the color of my skin. This sort of thinking has been haunting me for quite some time. One of Obama's many failures was his inability to do what he was elected to do: Bridge the gap between Black America and the Whites who've dictated so much for so long. But we all saw what happened to him. He was accused of not being an American (the impeached president has never produced his own birth certificate…nor his promised tax returns, for that matter), and one of the biggest peddlers of that racist idea sits in Obama's office now, with the lights turned off. President Obama was denied his Constitutional imperative of nominating a Supreme Court justice for an entire year, making our first Black president capable of completing only 3/5 of his job. President Obama was hobbled from before he started by the rage that racism's most open--but by no means only--face vomited over him on a constant deluge. Yet it was under Obama that Black Lives Matter was created. It was under Obama that Ferguson erupted in violence, riots, and agony. Flint's water crisis was not solved by Black faces in high places. President Obama failed here, and that failure is not one that's isolated to a certain area of the country: It's an American failure. This is America. We are America. We all have to deal with the reckoning that's been too long delayed and ignored. I fear I may have been to broad in my sketching of what I see, so here's a more direct answer to the question that inspired this post, "Why is this happening here?" Because racism is like piss in a swimming pool: It can't be held in one corner that you avoid. It spreads and ruins everything. Because racism is the mortar between the building blocks of this country. Because racism explains why we're living on looted land. Because racism isn't a problem that other people have: We all have to deal with it. Because racism turns systemic power against fellow brothers and sisters, against human beings, and objectifies them. Because racism diminishes everyone, and it always has. Because being part of a country means being a part, not apart, from it. Because when others mourn, cry out for justice, or seek change toward the betterment of mankind, I am duty-, morally-, religiously-, and ethically bound to mourn, cry out, and seek change with them. Because the failures of leadership going back to the British colonies and deep into the Age of Genocide (or Exploration, if you're feeling like wearing kid-gloves) and continuing in every subsequent era has given us a world that needs us to recognize and wake up. Because the failures of individuals who wish that this didn't happen encourage, support, and provide justification for the continuation of the abuses that are being protested. Because beneficiaries of racism can no longer hide behind a purported veil of ignorance. Because kneeling for the anthem didn't work. Because preaching non-violence got a King assassinated. Because Gandhi's words work when everyone believes in them, not only the oppressed. Because nothing else has woken us up. --- * I put this in quotes because, while serious, they are fortunate failures. Still…while my oldest is now a teenager and, as I mentioned, healthy, there is always a specter of fear that haunts me and my wife; it's why this pandemic has been so stressful. And as far as him being a "failure" of mine, I do not know of a parent who would look at their two-week old son, nested by an embrace of tubes and wires as he valiantly fought for breath, and not feel somehow and somewhat responsible for that situation. If you've never been in the antiseptic atmosphere of a newborn ICU, you are 1) fortunate, and 2) unable to know what it feels like to be a parent there. |
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