Princess in Chains

This week a guy friend of mine shared a picture of Princess Leia in her slave chains online, and a shitstorm of controversy erupted. The resulting anger, defensiveness, and general mayhem made me pull back and think. But when an idea just won’t let my brain rest and stirs up my dreams, I know I have to write about it before it will give me any rest.

What really struck me was a well-intended explanation that Leia in her slave attire is the sexual fantasy of all men of my generation. Now, I’m as big a Star Wars fan as the next geek, but Leia the slave is and always has been a really troubling image for me. Leia is many things, leader of the rebel coalition, a strategist, a warrior, and a spy. In spite of her diminutive stature and her unfortunate wardrobe, she is a power to be reckoned with. But it is Leia objectified, humiliated, and chained, stripped of her guns, clothes, and dignity, that makes men’s hearts (or whatever) pound.

When I say that bothers me, I’m speaking from a deep, deep well of feminine anger and pain. We’ve worked so hard – gone to college, climbed the ladder, educated ourselves and each other, fought for the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to credit, the right to manage our reproductive health, the right to run marathons, the right to walk onto the playing field or the stage or the space station or the boardroom. And some few men have helped us on that path, or at least cheered us on while we fought.

But feminism is far more than our achievements or limitations in the outside world. It is also about our intimate, emotional lives. We want so badly for our partners to love, understand, cherish, and respect us in our entirety, not just as the embodiment of some sexual fantasy. And certainly not the fantasy of woman defeated, humilated, violated. The old fairy tale of a man to complete us, to sweep us off our feet, to protect us, frankly creeps us out, because we know the flip side. Also most pop songs about romance, and most TV shows and movies, to be perfectly honest. Everywhere we’re surrounded by images and messages that present a romantic ideal that is at war with our truth. If you go beyond romance to sexuality and passion, it gets even worse. The archetype of the physically dominant male and submissive female is deeply ingrained in our culture. The man takes, the woman gives. The guy scores, the woman acquiesces. Scrawny female models pose drooping in their lace and chiffon, contrasting the pervasive imagery of the robust, active, sweating male. Even archeology and history are tainted – the truth of human history and cultures twisted to fit a heroic male dominance of time itself.

Your casual displays of misogyny make us relive every wretched heartbreak of our lives. Every man we risked loving, whose interest in us was revealed as only a pursuit of sexual satisfaction. Every man who admired our intellect until it contradicted his own views. Every man who was impressed by our strength until it defied his whims. Every man said sweet things to win our hearts, and then engaged in our methodical destruction with micro-aggressions and gas-lighting until we were at the edge of despair. Every man who laughed at the expression of our truest emotions. Every man who said “I love your voice” but never took the time to listen to what it had to say. Every man who interrupted or belittled us in public. Every man who sought our confidences and then used them against us. Every man we looked in the eyes, seeking tender connection but finding only coldness and distance. Every man who said “It’s not you, it’s me,” when we asked why. Oh, we know it’s you. We know damned well the carefully constructed walls you have built to protect your male privilege even at the cost of love and life and joy. But we keep hoping anyway.

When a woman, a woman that you know, says this is wrong, this makes me angry, why don’t you pay heed? You say you love and support us until we disagree with you or call you out. Then you retaliate, strike back, call us insecure, call us manipulative, call us weak. Insecure? We have lived our entire lives fighting against a culture that dishonors us and tries to force our submission. We know how hard we have worked, every single day, to overcome that and to achieve success. Insecure? When you’re not around we stand naked in front of the mirror and run our hands lovingly over our own delicious curves and through our silken hair. We turn the music up loud and dance, shaking our breasts and laughing and loving ourselves the way no man will. Manipulative? Every day we walk out our doors into a world that threatens our lives and bodies. We’ve learned hundreds of things that men need never know to walk the tightrope of survival. We work each day with men who devalue us and undermine us and yet still we succeed. Weak? With every muscle of our bodies we push new life into the world, through pain your worst nightmare cannot imagine. We work and cook and launder and clean and pay bills and read bedtime stories and stay up late to grade the papers or write the report and get up the next day short of sleep to do it again, over and over, holding the world together with nothing but our strength because we have to. And when our hearts and bodies and minds are exhausted and broken, we provide each other the bandages and salves to heal, so that we can stand up and walk forward again.

You lust for a princess in chains. But we know that in the end, Leia is alone, unchained and gray, and still stronger than anyone. It’s lonely, but it’s better than being a slave. 

Letter to the Electoral College

Dear Elector,

I write you as an American, a Texan, and a U.S. Army veteran. Please consider casting your vote for Hillary Clinton on December 19^th. Allow me to explain why I make this request.

Hillary Clinton has received 63.7 million of the popular vote. Donald Trump has received 62 million, making Mrs. Clinton the clear choice of the majority of American voters.

Donald Trump’s campaign was built on impractical promises designed to stir up racism and activate white nationalists. Among his more irresponsible promises:

• To build a wall on our southern border and “make Mexico pay for it” – a plan that is not only fiscally irresponsible but also served to insult and alienate the Mexican government.
• To ban Muslims from entering the United States – a plan that violates human rights and our constitution would cause needless suffering to innocent refugees fleeing war.
• To impose tariffs on goods produced in China and Mexico – which violates international trade rules and could lead to a trade war which would cost thousands of Americans their jobs and have a detrimental effect on the world’s economy.
• To withdraw the U.S. from NAFTA – which would not increase American jobs and could result in the U.S. being unable to negotiate favorable trade deals in the future.
• To repeal the Affordable Care Act – The ACA has resulted in the lowest ever uninsured rate in the U.S., has ensured adequate health care coverage for all insured, and has saved Americans approximately $2.6 trillion in health care costs. Repealing the ACA would result in economic hardships and lost lives due to lack of healthcare.
• To renegotiate with Iran – The deal that President Obama struck with Iran resulted in Iran shipping 25,000 pounds of uranium out of the country, dismantling 2/3 of its centrifuges, filling its heavy water reactor with concrete, and providing unprecedented access to its nuclear facilities. It’s hard to see what Trump hopes to achieve by “renegotiating” but it seems very likely that the results will be an erosion of our relationship with Iran and further destabilization of the Middle East.
• To “bomb the shit out of ISIS” – Trump’s ignorance about the nature of international relations and his accusations that the U.S. military is “weak and ineffective” is deeply troubling and offensive. The U.S. has the largest, most modern, and most effective military in the world. “Bombing the shit” out of any place tends to further radicalize the survivors without accomplishing any positive military or political goal. Trump is a loose cannon on the international stage and likely to at best embarrass the country, at worst plunge us into deeply destructive and pointless wars.

Donald Trump’s proposed cabinet picks illustrate the kind of president he will be and presents a clear threat to all non-whites and women in the country:

• Attorney General – Jeff Sessions. Three decades ago Sessions was deemed too racist to be a federal judge, having once called a black lawyer “boy” and advising him to “be careful how you talk to white folks.” He has spent his career fighting against all advances for racial equality, women’s rights, due process, or voting rights. His appointment is a clear message that Trump’s America will provide justice only to white men. White supremacists are drooling.
• National Security Advisor – Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn. Mike Flynn is known for exaggerating his credentials and his accomplishments. He served in Iraq as General McChrystal’s yes man and was known to bully anyone who disagreed with him. His brief tenure at the DIA was a disaster, his attempts to “shake up” the organization drowned in his own naiveté and arrogance. Even more worrying, Flynn was paid to speak in Moscow to honor a pro-Putin propaganda outlet, RT.
• Director of the CIA – Mike Pompeo. Mike rose to fame as the congressman from Kansas who led the expensive and completely fallacious “Benghazi” attacks on Mrs. Clinton. He has also called for renewing the bulk collection of American’s domestic telecommunications records and advocates for the use of torture in interrogations, both illegal. He has close ties to Koch industries and has received large contributions from Koch employees. Pompeo would be the most blatantly partisan CIA director in that organization’s history.

The list of Donald Trump’s ethical challenges is far too long for me to list here. A little research reveals that he has no standards of professional or private behavior. He is completely without morals and acts without thought of legality or harm to others. Here are a few of the more newsworthy issues:

• Has been accused by at least a dozen different women of sexual assault and has been recorded bragging about assaulting women.
• He has been accused by a victim and a witness of violently raping a 13-year-old child, who withdrew her charges after receiving an avalanche of death threats from Trump supporters.
• Donald Trump settled a lawsuit for his fraudulent Trump University for $25 million, then bragged on Twitter how it was a “small fraction of the potential award.”
• On 11/21, Trump held a meeting at Trump Tower with top media execs, and then proceeded to harangue and bully the attendees, saying that the media were a bunch of deceitful liars and that they got “everything wrong” in their coverage of him.
• He registered 8 companies in Saudi Arabia during the campaign, remaining today the president or director of 4 of them. He said of the Saudis during a campaign rally “They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
• Has been actively soliciting business from agents of foreign governments – a clear violation of the constitution that states “no person holding any office of profit or trust under the United States shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever from any king, prince, or foreign state.”
• He has refused to put his business holdings in a true blind trust, insisting that his children would run his business and he “wouldn’t talk to them about it.” This creates a clear conflict of interest, especially where his heavily leveraged real estate holdings are concerned. How can he make disinterested decisions about economic policy?
• Only 15% of Trump’s statements during his campaign have been rated as true or mostly true by fact-checkers. The American people and our allies can have no assurance that he is speaking or will ever speak the truth in his role as the President.
• Trump has been sued over 3,500 times in the course of his career, often for “stiffing” contractors for work they have performed for his businesses. Even compared to other businesses of similar size and type, this is an exceptional number of lawsuits. Trump has settled in at least 100 of these cases, sometimes paying thousands of dollars in damages.
• Trump’s family’s decision to remain in New York means that the U.S. taxpayers will pay $1 million A DAY to provide security for them. Considering that some of that money is rent that the Secret Service will pay to Trump Tower, this is an unacceptable waste and ethically untenable.

But the most important reason, to me, to deny Trump the presidency is because of his clearly dangerous relationship with Russia and with the Russian autocrat Putin. We know that Trump’s campaign manager had questionable if not illegal entanglements with Russia, that Trump surrounded himself by pro-Russia advisors, that Putin manipulated Wikileaks to influence the election, that Trump had access to these Wikileaks documents before they had been reported by the press, that Trump had server hookups directly to a Russian bank, and that Putin and the Russian parliament gleefully celebrated Trump’s announced win. This tied with the fact that Trump continues to refuse to release any tax returns that might clear him of financial entanglements with Russia, should be a warning bell to anyone considering the impact of a Trump presidency. Will Trump put Russia’s interests ahead of our long-standing relationships with NATO and our allies? Will Trump’s friendship enable further atrocities by Putin in the Crimea and Syria?

For all of these reasons, I implore you to put the good of your country ahead of partisan politics and cast your vote for Hillary Clinton, the ethical, experienced candidate with the majority of votes in this election.

Thank you,

Geraldine Mongold

Breaking circles

As if the election wasn’t bad enough, sitting at Scholz’s Garten watching the returns with my daughter crying next to me, the days since the election have been some of the most wretched I have experienced. Yes, there have been some hugs and a glass or two raised with gentle friends. But there’s also been an enormous amount of dumbassery.

I’ve been doing the activist thing long enough to have acquired an assortment of motley friends, a little insight, and some ‘cred.’ It started by showing up at an event at the Oklahoma state capitol. Just showing up, wearing the tee-shirt someone gave me, chatting with some folks. I showed up to another event. I moved to Austin for a job. I marched with the Occupy folks. I didn’t know anything except that I was frustrated and wanted to make a difference. It seemed like change was possible if we just spoke up and educated people and made issues visible. 

Now we struggle to make sense of a country that has selected, by grace of the anachronistic electoral college, the most disgustingly unqualified, ignorant, angry, bigoted presidential candidate that our country has ever known. That he will lead us to economic and environment disaster is certain. That he and his cronies could and desire to destroy our democracy seems like a pretty high probability also.

There has been outrage. There has been marching in the streets every day. There has been an outpouring of grief and confusion and pain on social media. And suddenly there are a lot of people saying “What should I have done? What can I do now?” Many of them are young and just becoming aware. Some of them are older folks who have maybe never been political beyond voting and going to the school board meetings.

I know there have always been and always will be ignorant, violent, hateful people in the world. Their existence does not surprise me. But what has surprised and distressed me beyond imagining is the reaction of many of the activists I know.

I don’t know very well how to explain, but I’ll try to illustrate the point with a safety pin. Someone pointed out that people in Britain started wearing safety pins after the Brexit vote to indicate their solidarity with immigrants and their willingness to help people victimized by racism. So folks here got the idea to do the same. Stories of people finding the courage to wear the pins and of people who thereby found kindness and help from strangers began to trickle in. But activists began a furious barrage of criticism. Apparently this new crop of people who are trying to do some good, trying to find their voice, just don’t have the cred to wear the pin. They haven’t been marching in the streets with us. They haven’t been vocal about black lives and justice. They don’t understand the risks. They don’t understand the responsibility. They haven’t done all the hard work. 

I don’t understand this tribalism. I don’t condone this exclusive attitude. And I’m beyond depressed that the people who are so busy criticizing and standard setting are women. It struck me today, as I sat on the front steps of City Hall for a protest, crying softly behind my sunglasses, that this is no different than the hundreds of other ways that women enforce the patriarchy by policing each other’s dress and behavior and ensuring that women who step out of line are ostracized and punished. It’s the mentality of powerlessness, the tactics of oppression turned against the other victims of that oppression. It’s a purity test that no one can pass. It holds us down instead of lifting us up, damages our cause rather than advancing it.

I may not have been much of a soldier, back in my military days, but I did learn the difference between defense and offense, and which was more likely to bring victory. I also learned that you have to plan and fight your battles with the soldiers you have in your platoon. The strong ones; the weak ones, the seasoned troops, the kid just out of basic, the expert marksman, the swaggering fool who’s likely to get the first bullet. You don’t get to pick and choose. You just figure out how to make it work with what you’ve got.

I’m dropping out of most of the groups I’ve worked with in the past. I realize my sphere has been too small, my mind too comfortable. I have no idea what the future holds for any of us, least of all me. But I do know that I’m not going to circle the wagons if that means leaving people outside in the cold. 

Beaumont

Not sure how old I was, but in the pictures I look about ten. Lanky, long, wearing too-short hand-me-down plaid pants, hair in braids. For some reason my grandmother got the idea to drive down to Beaumont to visit some elderly cousins of hers, and mom and I tagged along. Grandmother was very into genealogy and the bonds of family. It wasn’t unusual for her to detour on a road trip to some small town to show up unannounced on the front porch of someone she hadn’t seen for 50 years. I didn’t really care what the reason was; I just loved to go places. Anything that sniffed of adventure was okay with me.

I don’t remember a thing about the drive to Beaumont or about the town itself. Turned out the cousins were two frumpy, gray old ladies who shared a house. One of them had a hobby of painting glass. She showed us her treasures and we enthused politely. She made us a gift of two of her vases.

We sat down to a meal together. Lunch maybe? I don’t remember anything except the conversation, which was appalling. The cousins were distressed about the state of their community, apparently near total decay and destruction on account of them awful niggers. Grandmother and Mom picked silently at their food, looking more and more distressed as the venom flowed in waves. As soon as the meal was over, we fled for the car.

“Well that was uncomfortable,” Grandmother said.

“It was purely awful,” Mom agreed. Looking at me in the back seat, she added “I’m really sorry you had to hear that.”

“I just didn’t know what to do,” Grandmother said. “I’d never met them before. I had no idea.”

To wash off the feeling of that visit, we drove to Galveston. It was the first time I’d seen the ocean, and I was instantly in love. I played and rolled in the waves in my plaid pants until Mom dragged me away, reminding me of the long drive home. I looked back over my shoulder until the water faded from my sight.

I still own, and use, those two hand-painted vases. Every time I get them out and fill them with flowers, I remember those angry, ugly old women. I think that’s why I keep them. For a long time, we’d thought that level of open racism had faded from the scene, but it has not. We were complacent because we couldn’t see it, but Obama’s presidency and the rise of social media has torn away that veil.

I wish my mother or grandmother had spoken up during that uncomfortable meal, had said “You know, this isn’t okay with me, and it’s not okay to say these things in front of a child.” That’s another reason I keep the vases. Because I’ve found my voice since then, and although I’m still a daughter of the south, I’ve thrown away the fake veneer of “manners” that enables hatred and injustice to go unchallenged.

And I’ve never again worn plaid pants.

For my cat

My cat is crying
Because his lady-love
Was smashed by a passing car.
The days go by
But his weeping grows no less.
His paw touches my face
But I don't kiss right
For a cat.
He falls asleep next to me
But in the morning
His yowls begin
Before the dawn.

The Hills

My recent summer vacation took me from one end of the almost endless Texas panhandle to the other. Taking the not-interstate whenever possible, I cruised through towns like Happy, Tulia, Stinnett, Hartley and Quitaque. As usual when in the western half of the state, I kept the windows up and the AC on recirculate, to mitigate the stench of the oilfields.

Living in Austin, a busy, overflowing, self-important little city, one forgets that Texas is mostly a vast empty land. In some parts, the oil wells and cattle far outnumber humans. The wind turbines are starting to get a pretty good population going in some parts too. I drove through towns where every place of business was boarded up. I stopped at gas stations with frighteningly dysfunctional plumbing where clearly no employee had ever been trained in the use of a mop. I walked into restaurants and immediately turned to walk out again, overwhelmed by the stench of a chronically dirty kitchen. I drove around wild turkeys sauntering down Main Street, clearly not used to being disturbed by automotive traffic.

Texas has a carefully crafted self-image of rugged spaces, lean ranchers, industrious farmers, adventurous roughnecks, blue skies, and small towns filled with the virtues of community, tradition, and good sportsmanship. The reality doesn’t quite match up. Perhaps once, when farms and ranches were smaller, when distances were longer, when each little town had its own post office and school and general store and doctor’s office and café. But that’s a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Not even in the most remote parts of rural America.

As the small towns crumble and the smartest and most adventurous move away for bigger things, as their relevance dwindles and their communities shrink, the ones who are left develop a hard, brittle anger that has become the new hallmark of small-town life. Teachers hang crosses and flags in their classroom and insist on the daily pledge. Preachers shout brimstone and judgement from the pulpit. Confederate flags and Come and Take It bumper stickers predominate. Pickup trucks tailgate aggressively and pass in a cloud of dust. A “love it or leave it” creed is espoused by people who clearly no longer love nor take pride in their own communities.

Most of Texas is only slightly arable. Farms here were never cozy little affairs with a red barn and a white house and peonies in the yard. It’s always been a hardscrabble place. For Texas farmers and ranchers, economic survival requires a lot of land. Everything’s bigger in Texas because it has to be. 160 acres just ain’t gonna cut it. The landscape is littered with crumbling, abandoned houses and barns. Did their occupants sell out or die out?  I drove past a lot of “ranch for sale” signs. A thousand acres is kind of on the small side. That’s a lot of barbed wire fences.

Then slowly, as one slides down off the high plains towards the hill country, small oak trees begin to appear. The hills round into pleasant green mounds. Suddenly, there are hunting ranches with elaborately rugged entrance gates, and vineyards with cute names. Towns abound with BBQ pits and antique stores and rusty Texana. Snow in the Meadow blooms between the cactus, and a soft gray rain is falling. Having come down from the Rockies to this in one day, I see these homely hills in a new way. How comfortable the hill country is, with its constant bouquet of wildflowers, the broad, welcoming arms of its enormous oaks, the happy laughter of its hundreds of springs and creeks and streams, its feminine curves of undulating hills, the endless music of its birds.

Then you get closer to Austin, where the hills are covered with mansions and malls and mega-churches and self-storage warehouses, where skyscrapers and cranes are reflected in the quiet water of the Colorado River. People crowd the parks and bars and jogging tails and greenbelts, enjoying their city and their youth and their lives. Nothing could be more different from those dying West Texas towns. Or maybe not? The roughneck and the rancher, the tech hipster and the developer, they all take whatever they can get from this land. Oil, cattle, rental income, an IPO, or an exciting single track trail – all the same really. When your brain is numb from the hum of the road, does everything make sense, or nothing?

I parked the car and got out, my legs stiff from long hours on the road. I walked over to the oak tree in my yard and touched my hand to its bark. A live oak tree has a distinct personality. It’s a friendly tree; it likes to be touched and spoken to. The wet smells of my garden and the busy buzzing of my bees filled my senses. Then a motorcycle screamed up the hill in front of my house, leaving the scent of exhaust fumes behind.  I turned to go inside.

Party Politics - Texas Style

I took off from work last Friday and drove to San Antonio with my daughter to attend, as a guest, the Texas Democratic Convention. This was a first for me, and I felt oddly amateur about the whole endeavor. I hadn’t planned on going, since I couldn’t attend the county convention, but my daughter said “it would be interesting,” and I couldn’t very well argue with that.

I managed to navigate directly to the AlamoDome. The tricky bit was finding the parking entrance. The building entrance wasn't obvious either. I followed some people who hopefully knew more than I, and found a sign that said “guests.” We got our badges and programs and then sort of guessed a general direction to walk which turned out to be the right one and landed us on the floor of the AlamoDome. This was sectioned off into four big meeting rooms and a maze of booths by blue and white curtains. We oriented, checked the schedule, and decided we had time for a quick bite of food before anything of interest happened. This turned out to be a not-thoroughly-heated pre-frozen breakfast sandwich, which we ate standing up. There were a few chairs, but I observed the large number of elderly attendees and chose to stand.

Since we were guests and not delegates, we were free to roam as we pleased without responsibilities. We gravitated quickly to the Women’s Room where we found a few familiar faces. After I sat down and got adjusted, a woman in a big cowboy hat asked about the empty seat next to me and sat down. Then she said “Geraldine?” and wrapped her arms around me in a bear hug. I’m as huggy as the next person, but I was glad when she whispered her name into my hair. Facebook friends aren’t always easy to recognize in real life, but turned out she was indeed a dear friend and fellow administrator of our Facebook group What Happens in Texas. We watched a bit of presentation and discussion panel about reproductive rights. Shortly after we met up with a few other buddies. More hugs and selfies, Renee and I then decided to prowl the booths for a bit. This turned out to be not very exciting. There were a few politicos I knew, a few I didn’t, and a bunch of people selling pins and tee-shirts to support their local party org or campaign. I decided not to engage the anti-vaxxers (who invited those fools?) or the NRA (seriously?), but I did get entangled with an eager young Tesla salesman who clearly hadn’t taken a spin selling class.

Back to the Women’s Room to take in a presentation by Annie’s List. They’ve updated their training, and I think it’s definitely an improvement. It was really hard to hear anything, because there were other equally well amplified and well attended events happening on the other side of a flimsy blue and white curtain. My friends were getting hungry and restless, so we decided to join them in a hunt for real food. I abandoned my car in the AlamoDome parking lot and rode with them on a bizarrely hilarious hour-long trek across downtown San Antonio in the vain attempt to find parking anywhere near a restaurant. Luckily a retired nurse, a chaplain, a hangry 14-year old, and I all managed to keep our sense of humor and not eat each other before we finally landed at Fuddruckers. After a beer and a salad (healthy!) I took Renee aside and asked her if she wanted more politics or some Riverwalk. She opted for the river, so the rest of the afternoon was spent wandering slowly in the heat, sketching and taking pictures. We ended the day at the Marriott bar, which was filled with democrats for a change.

So, my deep thoughts about the whole thing, for what it’s worth.

1. Party politics are mostly run by elderly women, so why aren’t more women running for office?
2. I don’t understand nearly as much about the political process as I thought I did, but apparently I need a cowboy hat if I'm going to be taken seriously at this sport.
3. Event planning isn’t for amateurs.
4. Just showing up is really important.
5. Downtown San Antonio is a freaking nightmare.
6. Nobody really looks like their profile picture.

Texas School Statistics

As an introduction to a series I'm doing for What Happens in Texas about Texas schools, I started by researching a few facts and figures. In many cases, the data I discovered created more questions in my mind than answers, but I've decided that's a good thing. Research works that way; you're never sure where it's going to take you. I'm just going to put these here without a lot of explanation, and go swimming in the details later. I do want to call out the monkey wrench I threw in the last graph, which compares Texas per student spending to the US and to the averages of other developed countries, because I think this looks really interesting.

Trump Tantrum

An acquaintance posted something on Facebook today that kind of made me throw up in my mouth. “People don’t understand the rage that Trump supporters feel.”

So, let’s talk about rage. I grew up with Watergate and Vietnam on the news every evening. I grew up in the world of the draft and Kent State, a world where women weren’t allowed to run marathons or have their own credit cards. During high school, I watched Reagan destroy our economy, laugh at the AIDS epidemic, and violate federal and international law with impunity. I watched my beloved home state turn into a third world country of pollution, poor education, and unregulated corporate greed. I walked the streets of San Francisco in the 80s where men like living skeletons marked the days until their inevitable deaths.  I’ve watched my friends get beat up and thrown to the ground for the crime of speaking or sitting. I’ve marched with women who have lost their children to the violence of racism, and had cops point rifles at my head for it. I’ve been denied jobs, promotions, and opportunities because I’m female. So yes, I do know about rage. But anger isn’t always destructive, in spite of what the self-appointed gurus tell us. My rage is for the disenfranchised, for the creatures of the earth denied the chance to live in joy, peace, and prosperity because of human greed. My anger drives me to activism, to liberalism, to compassion.

If this was your anger, you’d get involved. You’d vote for someone who cares, who has a plan to right some of these wrongs. But your anger is not this. Your anger is the same rage that drives a jilted man to murder his wife or girlfriend. Your anger is the same rage that causes a toddler to smash the toy he’s been told to share. Your anger is the rage of privilege denied.

Yes, I get it. You were supposed to get a great ride in this life. It was supposed to be awesome. You were supposed to rule the world. Or, at least, live some kind of James Bond fantasy of women, adventure, and wealth. But from your stand-up desk in the financial district, you can see the beginning of the end of the patriarchy. People abandoning the church. Women college graduates outnumbering men. Blacks marching in every city demanding justice. The legalization of gay marriage. The legalization of marijuana. Grandmothers chaining themselves to pipelines. But, even if human civilization would continue to endure patriarchy’s toxic legacy, nature herself will not. She is in a burning rage, and business as usual will not appease her. You can blame this on my generation, just as I could equally well blame it on my parents’ generation. We would both be right, and it wouldn’t matter. Civilization is just beginning, or just ending, or maybe both, and you’re scared as shit.

So, you’re going to vote for Trump. Because you want to go out in a blaze of glory maybe? I guarantee that didn’t work so well for the Third Reich, and it won’t work well for you either. You’re just a very small pawn in the game, after all, no matter how your gonads ache for greatness. You could devote what’s left of your insignificant life to solving problems and bettering the world, or you could just grab what you can with your fat white hands and scream for more. 

Little peach houses

Sometimes I write about big important political stuff. And sometimes I just want to talk about me. Hey, it’s my blog, ya know?

So this is the story of a house.

I was about 13. My mom was in graduate school studying library science. We lived in Denton, a nice little college town in north Texas. My mom had some kind of library seminar to attend in Austin, so we packed up for a long weekend and headed down I-35. Back in those days, all children were free-range children, so while my mom did her library stuff during the day, she turned me loose on Austin with $10 in my pocket and instructions to meet her at 5 p.m. every day.

During the day, I wandered happily through Austin’s streets and alleys. There were no skyscrapers then, just the pink dome of the capitol looming over the rest of the city. I walked through the capitol, stared up into the rotunda, marveled at the custom carpet in the chamber with the Texas logo woven into the pattern. I ran my hands over the limestone walls of historic buildings. I stood under the vast green canopy of the Treaty Oak and felt its peace wash over me. I lunched at cheap downtown sandwich shops and window shopped at all the boot stores. I wandered around the university and breathed the sharp sweet smell of boxwood hedges basking in the sun. I checked out cool restaurants and bars to bring my mom to after hours.

In the evening hours, Mom and I went to steak restaurants and piano bars and drove around town checking out the sights. In Texas then, a minor could go anywhere and drink anything with a parent. Good times. I remember driving together down one quiet, tree-lined street and seeing a house that instantly captured my heart. It was a stucco house, peach-colored, with a porch and a round window on one side like a hobbit-hole. It looked so complete, so content, so right on its green street corner, and I fell immediately in love. ‘Some day,’ I told myself, ‘I will live in Austin, and I will own that house.’

The weekend ended, we returned to Denton, and years went by. I joined the Army, married, got out of the Army, and dragged my new husband to Austin to go to college. We lived in a little rental duplex in south Austin, and I forgot about the little peach house. After 3 years, I graduated, moved to Houston, moved to Portland, moved to Oklahoma, suffered my share of trauma and setbacks.  Then a friend emailed me about a job in Austin that I should apply to, and I did. After three brutal interviews, I got an offer, packed my bags and boxes and pets, and moved back to Austin after years away. An Austin with skyscrapers, with traffic jams, with tech yuppies and hipsters and coffee shops. An Austin where the boot stores have been converted to pubs and the pubs have been converted to condos. I found another south Austin rental, unpacked, and settled in.

Then one day, driving down 45^th Street on my way to somewhere, I noticed a dark gray house on the corner. It was odd, how that nondescript little house kept catching my eye whenever I drove past. Something about it. I maneuvered my Jeep around the treacherous curves and wondered. A week later, I drove past again. What a cute little round window it had, I noticed. Then it hit me, out of the blue. That was the house. The one I had dreamed of. The house I would live in when I was old enough and free and could do as I pleased.

I have my own house now; a nice green tri-level fixer-upper in south Austin, with a scruffy garden and chickens in the yard. It’s not my dream house but it’s mine and that’s okay for now. I go to dance class with my daughter every Monday, and we drive past the little gray house that should be peach. I look over at it and smile. The other day, I turned off and parked my car and took some pictures of it. There was an older man with a child in his lap on the porch. A friend parked her car in front and walked up the front walk, smiling and waving. The traffic roars past now. 45^th Street is a busy thoroughfare, not a quiet neighborhood street as it was. But the house is happy and lived in and loved. I wonder if the people who live there think it’s odd, strangers stopping to photograph their house. I wonder if they know it's supposed to be peach.

Solitary Hell

I'm writing a series on Texas issues and legislation for a Facebook group I help administer, called What Happens in Texas. This was first published there.

When I started looking for information about the use of solitary confinement in Texas, I naively assumed that there were laws and rules governing the use of same. It didn’t take much research to disabuse me of that happy little fantasy.

So what is solitary confinement? It means isolating a prisoner in a small cell, usually with a solid door and the lights always on, for 22-24 hours a day. Solitary confinement has become so common that there are “Supermax” facilities at the state and federal level that are comprised mostly or entirely of solitary confinement cells. At the state level, there is little reporting and oversight of the use of solitary confinement. The management of its use is generally internal to the prison, which means that prisoners have no recourse or protection.

The ACLU reports the following statistics about solitary confinement in Texas:

• About 4.4% of Texas prisoners, or 6,500 people, are in solitary confinement.
• On average, these prisoners spend FOUR years in solitary confinement, but over 100 prisoners spent more than TWENTY years in solitary.
• There is no rehabilitation from solitary before jail release; in 2013, Texas released 1,243 prisoners directly from solitary confinement to civilian life.
• Maintaining the solitary prisoners costs Texans $46 million a year.

“We’re torturing people, in my eyes. We’re torturing people and then we’re letting them out. It’s not to our advantage as a community to do that.” Betty Gilmore, SMU

Human beings are social animals. We do not do well deprived of human contact. There is a multitude of mental and emotional side effects of solitary confinement. These include:  hypersensitivity to stimulus, hallucinations, panic attacks, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, nightmares, insomnia, dizziness, depression, suicide, and total mental breakdown.

What makes this even more horrific is the fact that the many if not most prison inmates suffer from mental illness before they ever set foot in prison. Due to our lack of mental health care, prisons have become de facto housing units for the mentally ill. The fact that we’re essentially torturing people who are already victims is sadistic.

Well, you might think, people only get put in solitary if they are violent and dangerous. It’s a necessary evil. Well no, not exactly. The reasons why people get placed in solitary vary widely and often have nothing to do with safety:   acting violent, possession of weapon, testing positive for drug use, possessing contraband, using profanity, ignoring orders, exhibiting mental illness, being gay, being transgender, being a minor, being Muslim, being Rastafarian, reporting rape or abuse by prison guards, using social media, having gang associations….

So, in civilian life, you might be bullied, teased, fired, harassed, or beat up for being a little different. In jail, it is perfectly legal for the state to torture you to insanity for these things. And there’s no avenue to plead your case. There’s nothing but your own strength to keep your mind from flying apart as you spend years staring at gray walls.

Resources:

http://www.aclutx.org/2015/02/05/a-solitary-failure/

http://solitarywatch.com/facts/faq/