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April, You Stink

25 Apr

April is not my month, never has been.  For some reason, however, I always forget what bad luck April seems to bring.  All I can do is think about the sun on my face, the trees in bloom, the longer and longer days, the coming of summer.  I plan visits to the beach and a good vacation.  I put my winter coats away, vowing to not wear them again until the cold returns in the fall, not caring if this means I am a little chilly here and there.  I always approach April with so much optimism and am so shocked when April, once again, fails me.  What is it with April?

April was the month, three years ago, when I had my heart broken.  Rather than being out enjoying the beautiful weather, running around the park, eating outside, I spent days crying on my bathroom floor.  I remember walking outside the day after it happened, the day when I felt like the floor was ripped out from under my feet, and being angry at April.  Being angry at the perfect weather.  I felt resentment towards the warm breeze and the beautiful flowers.  How can they all be so pretty, so alive, when I felt so miserable?  How can the world just, continue?

April is also the month of horrible (domestic) things, most recently the Boston Marathon bombing.  But there’s also the Virgina Tech Massacre, Waco, the Oklahoma City Bombing.  Something about April, I don’t know.  Maybe all the energy people had stored up over the winter, maybe all the anger, just comes barreling out at this first sign of Spring and optimism.  Maybe all the time spent cooped up indoors was spent planning out evil rather than dreaming about warmer days.  Maybe it’s a resentment towards the happiness of others.  Who knows.  But there is something about April.

This April for me has been tough.  It always seems to be.  It’s been topsy-turvy and unpredictable.  But it has also been great. I had my best blog day ever, albeit a blog written about an event I wish never happened, a blog I wish I never had to write.  I participated in a conference at school and, at the risk of sounding self-impressed, I killed it.  I started making some serious progress in my thesis and have started to believe I might actually be able to finish this thing. I discovered that OB has started selling the Ultras again, which basically improves my life exponentially.  Bought two boxes yesterday.

So, April, I am glad you are almost over, I’m not going to lie.  But this year, I think I will remember you for the good you brought rather than the bad and maybe that change in outlook towards you will change your treatment towards me. I will approach you with optimism, tempered with trepidation.   I won’t forget the bad, like I sometimes do, but I will choose to cast it aside.  We’ll see how this works.  Guess we’ll have to wait until next year to find out.

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This Week Sort of Felt Like the World was Ending

20 Apr

Important!  This piece is me working out some of my conflicting thoughts about what has transpired over the last week.  I hope in reading this, people understand that I feel relieved that the suspects have both been taken off the streets, although I do regret that one of them was killed.  I feel relieved, but I do not feel happy, or celebratory.  What they are accused of having done was undoubtedly horrific.  But I am worried that, once again, we as a society are going to miss a very crucial moment in political time to ask hard questions about why this has happened.  Please keep that in mind as you read.

This has been a really awful and confusing week and I feel, to put it simply, quite conflicted.  When those bombs went off in Boston on Monday I, along with everyone else, was totally shocked.  I had come home from a run to text messages from friends asking me if I knew and if I was alright – some people thought it possible that I was there.  I spent the next two hours in my sweaty running clothes glued to a live stream, hungering for any information at all that would give a clue of who could have done something so horrible, and why.  I know I was not alone.  This week has seen me scouring news sources, reading every single update about the explosion, the victims, the hunt for clues as to the identities of the perpetrators.  I knew that, in a busy shopping district dotted with high-end stores, there would undoubtedly be images captured on video, it was only a matter of time.  And then the time came.

To see the images of these men who were suspected to have out carried out this gruesome attack was mixed.  I was glad that some headway had been made, that there were suspects in mind but at the same time I was sad.  I knew that the attack had happened, I knew that nothing I could think or say could take us back to Monday morning, to a time when these men could have been thwarted or changed their minds.  But seeing them and knowing full well that if they were caught alive their lives would be ruined, along with the lives of so many that were ruined on Monday, made me think:  another two casualties.  Intellectually, I knew it was too late and they would face justice, as they should.  But as a human being, I couldn’t help but think about what it was that inspired them, and specifically, what flipped the younger brother who, by all accounts, had always seemed a good kid.  I felt sad that we, the inhabitants of the world, lost him to this evil.

Thursday was a particularly hard night for all of us, I think.  Information was coming out, but haltingly.  Barely anyone was covering the shooting at MIT.  No one was saying whether or not it was connected to the Monday bombing.  It really felt like, combined with the failure of the background check bill in the Senate and the plant explosion in Texas, the world was ending.  Nothing made any sense.  Everything, everywhere seemed completely out of control.  I waited with baited breath for the next thing to happen, for the next report to come out, for it to be in New York, or DC, for it to be something big.  Thankfully, the thing I was waiting for never happened, it never came.

And then Friday. I spent the day glancing at my Twitter feed, checking the New York Times website, looking up at CNN at work until the second brother, a 19-year-old kid, was found hiding in a boat in someones backyard.  The whole city had been shut down, militarized, and there he was, in a boat on the grass.  And now we’re safe.

But I wonder, are we really? When I wrote my thoughts about Boston on Tuesday, I wondered, among other things, about what sort of security implications the bombing would have for marathons, the spectators and the runners, going forward.  Now that one bother is dead and the other is in custody, now that the imminent threat is gone, I am more worried than ever before.  We have a moment right now where everyone is listening, both domestically and internationally.  We have a moment, right now, where we can have a really serious conversation about why this happened and I don’t just mean why the brothers decided to do what they did I mean why, in a bigger context, what sort of social, economic, political, racial, historical factors might have played a role.  President Obama, in his statement after the younger brother was captured, asked

“Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?”

It’s a good question.  It’s a big question, and important one.  Probably bigger and more important than most people think at first.  What is it that makes people like the Tsarnaev brothers, like Major Nidal Malik Hasan of Ford Hood, like Najibullah Zazi who planned the failed 2009 attack on the New York City subway system go from seemingly normal, adjusted people to not? At some point we have to stop pointing the finger at them, at Islam, at whatever.  At some point we have to turn the mirror on ourselves.

Think about Sunil Tripathi, the missing Brown student, who was at first thought to be one of the bombers, largely thanks to Reddit.  And then think of Salah Eddine Barhoum who was questioned soon after the bombings.  I can’t imagine the kind of impact it must have on a young person’s life to have their face wrongly associated with such an awful event.  And the impact it has on other young people of color who see this unfolding before their eyes and realize that could have been them, they could have been accused.  I doubt it makes a lot of people feel terribly American.  I doubt it makes them happy or feel safe.

And then there’s this increased use of the suspension of Miranda rights, thanks in large part to the Obama administration, that has been supported by many of the same senators who voted no on the background check bill.

So as I said, I feel conflicted.  I want to know why these brothers did what they did, too.  I want to have some answers.  But I also want to have some harder conversations and I’m really afraid that, once again, we will miss the boat.

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To Boston from a Runner

16 Apr

I am a runner.

It has taken me a really long time to say that.  I always thought that runners were the people faster than me, who ran more than me.  I thought they were people who made a living off of it or who at least won an award here and there.  But yesterday, after coming back from a run, I spent two hours in my sweaty clothes, glued to a livestream on my computer and reaching out to everyone I know who lives in Boston or has family there.  I fielded text messages from people asking if I knew, hoping I wasn’t in the race.  This is not to say that I have more of a right to be devastated about what happened at the finish line of one of the most celebrated marathons in the world.  It is just to say that for a second I thought, god, what if I was there.

My first thought when looking at the video was about the time on the finishing clock.  It read 4:09 when the first bomb went off.  Anyone who has run a marathon knows that around the 4 hour mark, plus and minus about 15-20 minutes, is when most people finish.  It is when the road is especially crowded; when runners are especially focused and fading; when spectators are especially excited, scanning the thousands of finishers for their friends and loved ones.  It was, in that way, a perfect attack.  It hit when emotions were at their peak, when the potential for casualties was highest.

So now I am reminded once again that we live in what some call a “post-9/11 world” and the marathon is the latest casualty.  Security will be tighter, I would imagine.  Will they monitor our bags more closely?  Will we have to take off our shoes when we enter the corrals lest we smuggle in an explosive?  Will spectators have to go through metal detectors?  The magic, I am afraid, will be gone.

Marathon Day in New York City is like a holiday for me.  I wake up early, I rush to my corner, I jump up and down to keep warm while I wait to be amazed by the elite runners and the tens of thousands that come after them.  I stand there for hours and I cheer until my hands hurt from clapping and my voice hurts from screaming.  It’s a day when people achieve a seemingly impossible distance.  When camaraderie is built between people who have never before met and who will likely never meet again.  It is a day when everyone gets to prove to themselves that all the work they did — those early mornings, those painful miles, those track workouts and hill repeats — was all worth it.  Now the beauty of it, the innocence of it, the simplicity of it, will forever be tainted.

We now live in a world where it seems unreasonable to not have escape roots for possible bombings at all major events.  To not have armed guards at entrances to schools and stadiums.  Maybe some of you think the way we act internationally made this inevitable.  Maybe you think our grief over Boston, over all the people maimed, scarred and killed, is hypocritical because we don’t pay that much attention to the scores of innocent people killed by the United States every year.  And you know what, you are partially right.  Our country is in the wrong a lot.  But the thing is, it is unreasonable to expect people not to be devastated and scared by this.  The point is, I think, that all lives are of equal value.  That does not mean we should feel less compassion for people killed for no reason in Boston because our government regularly and needlessly kills people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria.  It means we should feel more compassion for those killed abroad because we know what senseless violence feels like now.  Again.  We know what it is to be confused and petrified and angry.

So, I am a runner.  And I will run again tomorrow.  And I will be out there cheering the marathoners on come November here in New York and I will qualify, and run, the Boston Marathon.  Because that’s what runners do, we keep right on running.  And that’s what people do, we keep going on.

So all my love to Boston.  To the runners, the spectators, the families, friends, loved ones of all those impacted.  You are in my thoughts.  You will be on my mind through all the many miles I will run this spring.  And hopefully I will be there cheering or running sometime soon.

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What do I know from Yoops?

11 Apr

So today when I was walking east on 33rd Street towards my long, long, LONG overdue* waxing appointment I heard something weird.  I was walking by a hotel (or maybe a fancy apartment building?  But probably a hotel because who in their right mind would want to spend a lot of money to live like 2 blocks from Penn Station) and outside there were two door guys talking.  They were both definitely born and raised in New York City somewhere.  Anyway, they were in the midst of a very heated conversation when one of them says to the other,

“Well, I wanted to get yoops to pick up the package but then I called the guy and the guy said that it was probably FedEx that was doing it and not yoops.  I don’t know.  I told the guy I think yoops is better.”

Okay.  So as I walked away I started thinking about why it might be that this guy calls the company yoops rather than U.P.S. like the rest of us.  I came up with the following few possibilities:

1.  It’s like his cute little thing that he does.  Kind of like the way that I say “water” which, admittedly, is a little less choice and a little more accent (and not terribly cute) but still.  It’s like when someone says something about Carl and then you’re like “who’s Carl?” and they’re like “Oh, you know Carl.  He’s the one that says yoops” and at that moment you know exactly who Carl is.

2.  He doesn’t like acronyms and so therefore just doesn’t use them.  He’d be all “well, there was this debate up at the ‘un’-security council the other day” or “I wonder whether ‘who’ is going to approve that new drug for malaria” or “ohmgah! Did you see the new Carie Diaries?!”**

3.  Maybe he doesn’t realize that it is actually called UPS and at first all his friends and family thought that he was just making a joke and they kept letting him do it and then they realized that he was serious but they had been letting him make a fool of himself for this many years and they sort of feel like assholes pointing it out now.

4.  Maybe ‘yoops’ is actually a thing that people say but nobody ever told me about it.

So, yea, that’s it for today.  Other than the fact that I have Funkadelic’s “Freak of the Week” stuck in my head which, all things considered, isn’t so bad.

*You know it is overdue when your waxing lady, who you have been seeing regularly for the past 6 years, takes a look at you and goes, “Oh, Rebekah…”

**Apparently in my mind ‘Carl’ is simultaneously an international affairs student and a 15 year-old girl.

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Two Storms, Two Gardens and a Thesis Topic

9 Apr

Update!  They posted the piece along with my original abstract on the journal website.  You can read it here, if you want.  Or you can just read it on this site.  Although my site doesn’t have an accompanying photograph or an abstract.

Later this month I am participating in a conference at my school during which I will be presenting some ideas on a topic that is sort of connected to what I am writing my thesis about.  Anyway, seeing as how I am a touch behind in the thesis writing process (surprise, surprise!) applying for admittance into this conference was perhaps not my best ever idea but there you have it.  As part of my participation, I had to write a 5-7 page paper on my topic, which I turned in yesterday, along with a short bio and a little teaser about what I plan on talking about to get people excited, or warn them, or something.  So I did all that and then I got an email from the staff of the school’s academic journal, which is apparently partnering with the conference organizer, asking me for a short piece about what had gotten me interested in the topic I decided to write on in the first place so they could publish it alongside the abstract I sent in as my conference application a few weeks ago.  If they like it, anyway.  So, I wrote that and then I decided well, if they decide not to publish it, then I would feel as though it was a semi-wasted effort so in an attempt to prevent that from happening, I am going to post it here!  So, here it is.  The story of why I got interested in my conference topic via the story of how I got interested in my thesis topic.  Enjoy.

The day after Hurricane Sandy left large swaths of New York and New Jersey damaged, burnt and under water, I took a walk down to the Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn to survey the damage.  I was shocked by what I saw – three foot high water marks on the public housing buildings, puddles the size of small ponds, piles of drenched belongings stacked on the sidewalks, cars that had floated from their parking spaces and had landed, water-logged, in the middle of normally heavy-trafficked streets.  I thought about the long road ahead for the people of Red Hook and other seriously impacted neighborhoods.  Quickly, my mind raced backwards to August of 2005 and the destruction wrought on the city of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.  I thought back to the images and stories that spewed out of that storm-ravaged city during the weeks, months, even years following the storm.  I started thinking about what it takes to repair.  Or, more specifically, who it takes.  I thought about the aid money flowing into New York from all corners of the globe.  I thought about how long that money would continue to come our way, what areas would receive most of it, what areas would soon be forgotten.  I thought about the Lower Ninth Ward.

During my walk through Red Hook on Tuesday, October 30th I started questioning my own thoughts about the abilities and, perhaps more importantly, the priorities of the United States government.  I am a staunch believer in the importance of a big government.  In the modern, capitalist society that we have created, I think the role of the government is largely to protect the people from the injustice of the unfettered market.  For years, I have been avoiding the reality that rather than being a beacon of hope for the millions of people forgotten by capitalism, the government has become a protector of the system at all costs.  The government has become a partner in further disempowering those most devoid of power to begin with.  I finally realized that if areas like the Lower Ninth Ward and Red Hook wait for the government to clean up a mess that is largely, through the persistence of its racist and classist policies and rhetoric, its own doing, they will be waiting forever.  Indeed, the Lower Ninth Ward, almost 8 years later, still has not gotten even close to the kind of sustained help as the French Quarter despite the fact that it sustained significantly more damage.

Once the waters and the aid money recede we are left only with ourselves and our desire to rebuild.  I began looking into similar movements in the Lower Ninth Ward and Red Hook that incorporated my own interest:  agriculture.  What I found were two separate organizations – The Backyard Gardener’s Network in the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans and Added Value in Red Hook, Brooklyn – both working to better their own neighborhoods in the aftermath of the storm through community gardening and youth empowerment in agriculture respectively.  This idea of using community gardening and urban agriculture as a means through which a neighborhood can build bonds, power, and resilience in the face of future disaster became my thesis.  Through my reading and interviews, I began to delve into the idea that the same structural racism that undergirded the poor response by the United States government, particularly in the case of Katrina and the Lower Nine, actually exists in our current conversation regarding urban agriculture.  This idea of certain people’s lives being hidden from the public eye is not something unique to disaster deterrence and response, but is something that works its way into a lot of what we do and what we talk about.  It exists in the interstices of lived and documented reality.  Urban agriculture is not something that is new but is instead something that has been happening in urban centers for generations and yet that experience has largely been omitted in our current narrative.  My idea was to use this conference as a way to delve a little deeper into a topic that is of great interest to me but which is only tangentially connected to what my thesis is principally concerned with analyzing.

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At which point I am (not) surprised that we will continue to not ban assault weapons

21 Mar

Sometimes I am left wondering about the overall sanity of this country.

I just read an article in The New York Times about the ongoing attempts of California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is pretty much my hero, to reinstate the ban on assault weapons that W. let expire in 2004.  Her journey, according to the article, ended on Monday when she stormed from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office after he informed her that the ban would not be included in a gun-regulation measure that is to hit the Senate floor in April.  The conversation surrounding this ban catapulted into mainstream conversation after the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut this past December that left 20 young kids dead along with 6 staff members as well as the killer, Adam Lanza.  You can watch a rather moving report about recent information that was released concerning the mass shooting here, presented by Rachel Maddow.  Beware.  This is not happy-making.

Anyway, the point of all this is that this bill on assault weapons had basically no chance of passing.  None whatsoever.  Despite support by both President Obama and Vice President Biden.  Honestly, I just don’t understand what the big deal is.  Banning assault rifles does not mean people can’t hunt.  It does not mean people can’t protect themselves and their families.  It does not mean people can’t collect some of the other hundreds (thousands?) or kinds of available weaponry.  It simply means that people won’t be able to legally purchase a gun that would then allow them to walk into an elementary school (or a movie theater, or a mall, or a high school) and kill dozens of people in mere minutes.  I mean, to me, and maybe I am just being crazy here, that doesn’t seem like such a big thing to give up.  Like, at all.  So here are a couple of arguments (okay, maybe just the same argument) that I read a lot and hear a lot and that I think are stupid.  So I am going to talk about them.

Argument:  It’s our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Answer:  Okay, so, the first thing is, and I know we have all heard this a kajillion times and so probably I am wasting my breath, but when that was initially written into the Constitution I am pretty sure that “arms” basically ended at things like muskets, and cannons, and bayonets, and the flintlock pistol (which I had never heard of but then I Googled “weapons used during the American Revolution” and there it was).  People used to fight in formation, for crying out loud.  So, back then when it was written, it made sense, given the recent history, to write a provision into the Constitution to address the legitimate concern of the people that they might have to protect themselves from their own government and also that they actually stood a chance of winning.  But now, here in 2013, even if there was a legitimate concern that we would have to protect ourselves from our own government, we would most certainly lose.  Because you know what? Even with all the assault rifles we still would not be as well trained, or as well armed, as the United States military.  In 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States spent $711 billion, or 4.7% of GDP, on defense.  A lot of that money was spent on, you got it, weaponry.  So, honestly, if People with Unnecessary Guns were to decide that they were going to stand up to the United States government in an attempt to topple it or whatever the fuck, those People with Unnecessary Guns would not stand a snowball’s chance in hell.  They would be blown to smithereens, and a Bushmaster .223 would do nothing to save them.

Argument:  It’s our Second Amendment right to have guns!

Answer:  I know, I already said that.  I know that’s not the only argument (it can’t be, right?!) but it seems to be the only one I ever hear).  But, I have another response!  How about people’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?  I am pretty sure that more often than not you get none of those things after you have been shot in the head multiple times.  I just don’t understand how this argument that people have a right to guns seems to always trump the argument that people have the right to actually live.  Because, last time I checked, you do need to actually be alive to even be able to appreciate your right to have guns, am I right?  It just seems like when someone who is unbalanced, or vengeful, or whatever gets some crazy scary, fast-shooting, so many bullets gun and goes into some venue full of people and shoots them all, we hear from all these people who are all

“No!  But if someone had a gun then none of this ever would have happened!”

which is patently false because, most of the time, when people have guns in circumstances like these, they don’t use them because they are afraid of being identified as the killer, or shooting someone by accident, or maybe they are too busy protecting themselves or others using their bodies or whatever else to really think about it.  That’s why usually these things end in the killer killing himself, not being killed by a potential victim. Anyway, we also hear about how scary it is, and sad, and unnecessary.  What we don’t hear enough of is that, because people can get guns, powerful guns, with such ease and in such great quantity, other people, sometimes even children, are stripped of their right to life.  To me, life seems like the trump card.  The right to life should just win.

You want your Bushmaster?  Well, guess what?  I want my breath, and the use of my legs, and a full functioning brain.  Settle for a fucking handgun.

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A Certain Word I’d Like to See Die a Quick and Public Death

5 Mar

As regular readers of my blog might have gleaned from my past three posts, I spent about a week in New Orleans visiting friends, doing thesis research, running a half marathon and running amok (totally didn’t know that’s how you spelled that word…learning!).  As a result, I had to switch around a few shifts both before and after to help not burden my coworkers or my financial situation.  One of the shifts I picked up on a trade was a Monday day.  It was a shift I worked for years and a shift that was, shall we say, not my favorite.  The main problem was that we have free wings on Mondays starting at 5pm (did you hear that?  Free wings!  Come one, come all!) and, to me, there is almost nothing more disgusting than chicken wings.  Well, maybe ribs.  Yea, ribs are more disgusting.  But really, anything on a bone that has to be gnawed off by whomever is eating it is really more than I can handle.  That is the reason, in fact, that I originally became a vegetarian.  When I was little I was never a huge fan of meat (well, except for my mom’s bolognese sauce, holy hell was that good).  I had a rather short-lived relationship with steak because, at age 8 or so, I was totally grossed out by the blood that pooled in that little moat around the outside of the cutting board that we had and simply couldn’t eat the stuff.  And then there was chicken.  And the gnawing.  Yea, so Monday’s are not my favorite.  I have to be in a room that smells like wings and then I have to pick up little pile of gnawed-upon bones off the bar because people are animals and seem unable to clean up after themselves.  Oh, and also, they eat the wings with their hands and then pick up their glasses to wash the food down without first wiping the grease off their hands and then the grease is smeared all over the glass and when I pick it up I get chicken yuck all over my hands and I want to hurl.

But I digress.  The point is, I picked up a Monday.  It was a very, very cold Monday.  Cold to the point that I was wearing my scarf and hat and dragged the space heater behind the bar with me so I could sit on it, figuring if my ass was warm the rest was soon to follow.  That, as it turned out, was faulty logic but live and learn, ya know?  Anyway, for the first two hours of the shift I was all by myself.  In the cold.  Sitting on the space heater.  I decided to entertain myself by watching CNN.  On this particular episode they had a few lawyers debating an upcoming death penalty case in Georgia involving a developmentally disabled man.  (Well, it’s no longer actually upcoming since this was over two weeks ago but at the time it was upcoming so we will just go with that.)  The basic issues of the case were as follows:

Warren Lee Hill was originally in jail for murdering his girlfriend and then, while in prison, beat another inmate to death with a 2×4 studded with nails.  How he got said 2×4 and said nails is really beyond me, but whatever.  Anyway, so as a result of the murder in prison he was sentenced to die by lethal injection.  Hill, however, has an IQ of 70 which puts him square within the range of someone considered to be mentally handicapped.  The Supreme Court, in the early aughts (2002?*), in Atkins v Virginia ruled it unconstitutional to execute someone with a significant mental handicap.  But, the Supreme Court left it up to individual states to designate what is considered a mental handicap and therefore who is legally able to be executed and who is not.  In Georgia, the state where this execution was to take place, an IQ of 70 places Hill in a class of people who cannot be executed in that state.  And yet, they were planning on executing him.  Totally fucked.  I mean, capital punishment is fucked anyway but this is just a class all in its own.

Anyway, the details of the case are not the most important part of what I am writing about here although it is absolutely rage-worthy so please, feel free to rage away.  I have been privately doing that for weeks now.  The particular segment that I was watching was one of those ones where you have the newscaster and then two expert people, usually with opposing opinions but not always, and they debate a number of topics.  So in this one, the newscaster was asking these two men, both lawyers, what they thought about this case.  The men both agreed that, given the law of the land, Hill should not be executed the following day (he wasn’t, for those who are curious) although one of the men seemed saddened by the law, all but saying he thinks that the law is crap and that this man who presumably cannot understand the difference between right and wrong and/or has limited impulse control and/or other possible things that I can’t think of right now because I actually know very little about the specifics of different types of mental handicaps and also I have a They Might Be Giants song stuck in my head and it is making me crazy and also sort of stupid, should actually be executed.  I did not like that man.  But the thing that made me dislike him even more than his rather, to put it lightly, tasteless opinion on the matter was his absolute insistence on using the word “retarded” over and over and over again.  It was a nationally broadcast news segment and this fucking guy was using a word that really makes me cringe.  A word that maybe when he was born in like 1882 was acceptable but which has become absolutely not acceptable in the century and a half since.  I was shocked.  And I wanted to write about it but I didn’t know what to say exactly other then to call my mom and be all,

Can you believe this fucking guy?  CNN is gonna get letters!  So, so many letters!

But really, I think what the problem is for me is that the R-word has become a slang that people just toss around.  Sometimes it is used to denote something positive, as in “that was ______ly fun,” but more often that not it is used as an insult.  What the word means to people now, and what it originally was intended to mean, have diverged significantly. It is no longer a descriptor of a condition, it is a way to other someone, to deride them, to question their intelligence.  I don’t think that when people normally throw it around they are actually thinking about mentally disabled people in a literal sense.  I don’t think they are aware, oftentimes, of the fact that before this word morphed into commonly used slang it actually meant something and that, as a result, it still means something.  Regardless of whether it has gotten miles away from its intended meaning it still has that meaning somewhere in its web, meaning that when it is used it is necessarily hurting someone, someone who does not deserve it, someone who is simply living his or her life. To use that word not only hurts its intended target, the one it is hurled at, but it also hurts those who, at some time, fell within its scope in simply a clinical way.  And that’s not fair.  It’s more than that, it is mean and thoughtless.

I don’t know if that made sense.  If not, then this article in the New York Times should make it a whole lot clearer.  It’s short.  And good.  You should read it.  But if you don’t read it, which would be a real shame, I will summarize it here.  Essentially, what author Lawrence Downes says is that words are mere “vessels for meaning,” and that the word “retarded,” has moved away from a clinical diagnosis and has become a “weapon of derision.” (I think maybe I just said that but it sounds way better coming from him.)  He then quoted an op/ed piece written by John Franklin Stephens, a man with Down syndrome from Virginia who is a “global messenger” for the Special Olympics.  Stephens wrote,

“The hardest thing about having an intellectual disability is the loneliness.  We are aware when all the rest of you stop and just look at us. We are aware when you look at us and just say, ‘unh huh,’ and then move on, talking to each other. You mean no harm, but you have no idea how alone we feel even when we are with you.  So, what’s wrong with ‘retard’?  I can only tell you what it means to me and people like me when we hear it. It means that the rest of you are excluding us from your group. We are something that is not like you and something that none of you would ever want to be. We are something outside the ‘in’ group. We are someone that is not your kind.”

I have read that passage about 12 times and every time it makes me teary eyed and gives me chills.  It is a perspective that I had never thought of before and one that is incredibly important.  This is a piece that, if I had the presence of mind to write down the name of the man on that CNN segment, I would have found it in full and sent it to him again, and again, and again until I was sure he had caved and read it.  I want this word to go the way of the N-word and the C-word.  I want this word to illicit anger and outrage when it is used, relatively unchecked, on a national news show.  And I want someone to give Stephens a lifetime supply of whatever is his favorite thing (I would want mangoes but that’s just me) for this amazing take-down of an Ann Coulter tweet:

Alien-Spawn Coulter on election night:  “I highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard”

Stephens: After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me.  You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.  I have to wonder if you considered other hateful words but recoiled from the backlash. Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.

You can read his full letter here and you should because it is fucking awesome and maybe will make you, make all of us, take pause before using the R-word again.

*I just guessed 2002 because I was too lazy to search on the intertubes and I was right!  My super-smart law student friend told me so!

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Because the Opinion of Fortune 500 Companies Matters More than Yours

1 Mar

Sometimes people make me really crazy.  Right now I am sitting in a coffee shop in The Treme neighborhood of New Orleans, reading my morning news and (theoretically) working on my thesis.  Really, I am gchatting with my friend and it just took me about a half an hour to read one article on the New York Times website.  The article I read, which I am now going to write about a little bit, is called “Refusing to Arrive Late on Same-Sex Marriage” and can be read here.

So first of all, I am a little put off by the title of this article.  The full title of the article, if my knowledge of common English sayings serves me correctly, which I am 100% certain that it does, is “Refusing to Arrive Late to the Same-Sex Marriage Party.”  In the idealistic and naive part of my brain this sounds great!  It’s like, yea! A party celebrating marriage-equality??  I wouldn’t want to be late to that either!  In fact, I would probably be EARLY because, in fact, I have been outside the venue waiting for this party for years now.  But the thing is, this is an article about businesses and so the “party” that this article is alluding to is not the happiness surrounding the fact that this country is finally en route to doing the right goddamn thing already, but instead that supporting gay marriage is a good business decision.  And that’s what kind of gets me about this whole thing.  It gets me that businesses and corporations, while legally they are treated like people just like the rest of us, which is a whole other issue that is all kinds of fucked up, are only doing the right thing because they will potentially reap financial benefit from doing so.  Not simply because treating all people equally is right.  Not simply because who are they, or anyone really, to tell people how they can and cannot celebrate their love and who they can and cannot include on their health insurance policy and who they can and cannot allow to have visitation rights and make end-of life decisions.  They are supporting it because now, in 2013, they don’t see it as a feasible business model to systematically discriminate against a whole group of people.  Because finally businesses have come around to realize that gay people aren’t only some small little proportion of the population who live on an island and have absolutely no impact on the economy whatsoever.  Gay people have money!  And that means that now, finally, they have power.  Or, better yet, that the power that they have had forever, because they are people, has finally been recognized because they have some green.  Businesses can say something now partially because they can’t afford not to.

I know that maybe I am being unfair.  I know that it is a good thing that companies like Goldman Sachs (who was ahead of the curve and whose chairman and chief executive Lloyd Blankfein participated in a commercial in support of same-sex marriage 5 whole years ago! Wow!), Estee Lauder, Abercrombie, Nike, Google, etc. are coming out in support.  That they are lending economic credibility to the movement, that they are making the legalization of same-sex marriage almost (thankfully) unavoidable.  But the movement was credible before.  It is 2013 for crying out loud and it is only recently that we are seriously addressing a disgusting, systematic form of discrimination.  It is only recently that people with money, people that control huge companies, feel brave enough to step up and speak their mind in support of their friends, family members, co-workers, customers.  What took so long and why does it take money to make it happen?  What is wrong with us?

And this other thing.  At the end of the article there is a quote by the Family Research Council which, obviously, filed a brief against gay marriage and blamed a “a corporate environment dictated by wealthy, pro-homosexual activists” for the business movement towards support of the issue.  The Council then went on to applaud Exxon-Mobile, which is the world’s largest company by market capitalization, for not taking a stance on the issue.  The Council said,

“We applaud Exxon Mobil for refusing to cede the moral high ground to the special interests of the left.”

Cede the moral high ground?  Treating people as your equal is ceding the moral high ground?! Special interests?  Seriously, how does someone wake up in the morning, with a brain that thinks these things and actually believes them to be right, look himself in the mirror and think,

“yea, I am an awesome person who deserves to be here and treated with respect.”

Cuz to that person I want to be like,

“No, dude, you’re just a bigoted asshole. Go suck a lemon.”

This spokesman for the Family Research Council thinks the business reasons behind supporting marriage equality are “trivial” and that the companies signing the briefs were “motivated by political correctness, pure and simple.”  You know what?  Maybe they were motivated by “political correctness” and if that is the case, then yea, that sucks.  They should be motivated by “correctness,” plain and simple.  They should be motivated by the fact that we all deserve all the same rights and opportunities, regardless of religion, color, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, and everything else.

And one last thing and then I am done.  I am really sickened by the fact that people are willing to go on the record and say hateful things about other people and think that it is okay because there are a lot of people who agree with them.  That makes me sad.  It makes me sad for all of us that people go out into the world every day somehow believing that they are more entitled to being treated like a human being than somebody else.  I look forward to the day when marriage-equality is just the norm.  When we look back on that the way we look back on the women’s liberation movement and say, god, can you believe there was a time that marriage equality wasn’t a given?  I really do but until then, I am going to continue to be disappointed no, livid, that it is taking us this damn long.  And I am going to continue to be pissed off that, as with everything else, it takes a person, or corporation, with economic power speaking out to really get this done.  When will people just do things because it is the right thing, the only possible thing, rather than when it makes sense from an economic standpoint.

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A Fear of Fire and Ice Explained?

28 Feb

This might sound strange to some of you but I am fairly convinced that in a past life I died in a fire.

For those of you who have spent a significant amount of time with me, I might have mentioned to you this discomfort I have with extreme temperatures, both hot and cold.  I’m pretty sure the dislike of cold, and more specifically of ice, stems from an experience I had as a young child.  I was 3, maybe 4 years old, and I accompanied my mom to the grocery store, something I still do when I am home.  I love, I mean love, the grocery store.  I was wandering the freezer aisle with my mom while she put whatever it was that she needed into her cart — I imagine it was Welsh Farms Coffee Royal Ice Cream, now discontinued, but I could be wrong — when I decided I wanted something from inside one of the freezers.  I somehow opened the door, reached in to grab the thing that I desired, and promptly got my lower lip stuck to the metal shelf.  I shrieked.  My mom had to quickly pull my mouth off the icy structure.  There was screaming, crying, bleeding.  To this day I can’t eat an ice pop without first washing it in hopes of melting that first sinister layer of ice and I simply cannot sit through A Christmas Story without getting queasy.

The fire thing I cannot explain through past experience.  I remember when I was younger I had this reoccurring dream of being locked in my house, although it wasn’t my actual house and I wasn’t actually me, but I knew that I lived there and even though I didn’t look like myself I was somehow still the same person.  Know what I mean?  I would be locked in this house, at the window, and I would be looking outside as someone got into a car, preparing to drive away and leave me unprotected.  Right as they closed the door to their vehicle I would smell smoke, turn around and see fire entering the room.  I would try as hard as I could to unlock the window but nothing, it was locked.  I would bang on it and bang on it as the fire got closer and the smoke got thicker and then, right as it approached me, I would wake with a start, breathing heavily and sweating.  I had this dream at least once a month, with slight variations, for years.

And then there was this other thing.  You know how sometimes people talk about out-of-body experiences?  I only had one of those once.  I was in the kitchen of the house I lived in from the middle of fourth grade until I went away to college, baking cookies.  They were raisin drop, if memory serves.  We had one of those two-tiered ovens and I was using the one on top.  I had decided, and this is something I would never ever ever do now because it is like playing with fire (no pun intended), to put the cookies in the oven without using oven mitts.  I figured, whatever, the oven is hot but the cookie sheet isn’t.  As I prepared to slide the cookies into the oven I said aloud to myself,

Okay, Rebekah, don’t burn yourself.

It was at exactly that moment that I saw myself from above.  It was like I was floating up by the ceiling but then corporeal me was down by the oven, mittless, holding the cookie sheet.  I saw myself slide the cookies into the oven and then I watched, in horror, as my body panicked, my hands lifted with a jerk to touch the top of the 350 degree oven and the cookie sheet tipped back, all the small blobs of dropped dough sliding back towards me and onto the floor.  As quickly as I left my body I was back inside it, looking at the mess on the floor and feeling a dull throbbing on the tops of my hands. That was literally the only time I really burned myself and the only time I saw myself from the outside.  I honestly don’t think it was a coincidence.  It was if something in me, my soul maybe, knew what was about to happen and was protecting itself, if not its physical manifestation, from the inevitable.

I literally haven’t thought about all that stuff in years.  I also haven’t had one of those fire dreams since I was in grade school.  But New Orleans is a spiritual city and I guess, when you spend enough time around all that unseeable energy you can’t help but engage with your own ideas and experiences with life and death and whatever comes in between.  Anyway, as I said, I am fairly certain that in a past life I died in a fire.  Let’s hope this go around ends slightly less painfully.

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Thanks for the company, Ira Glass

8 Jan

An ex-boyfriend of mine (I say that as if they number in the dozens) used to hate the sound of Ira Glass’ voice.  I imagine he still does.  The radio in his car was always tuned to NPR and whenever Ira Glass and This American Life would come on, my ex would let out a quiet groan and quickly shut the radio off.  I always imagined it was because, on top of being a bartender, he was a voice over actor and so he was especially critical of the voices of others.  He was allowed, I suppose, having an exceedingly nice voice himself.  As a result of his quiet disdain, I never really listened to Ira Glass, I always just took this dislike of his voice as a given.  Until I didn’t.  Ironically, Ira Glass does not have a voice for radio.  His voice is odd, not really low and not really high.  His words seem to come from farther back in his mouth than most and it almost sounds as if the very back of his tongue is touching the roof of his mouth when he utters certain sounds — such as the “gla” noise present in his own last name — making it sound as if, for lack of a better description, he is swallowing them.  It makes him identifiable, if nothing else.  Over time I have grown to really like it.

This morning I set out on a long run.  Sixteen and a half miles is a long way to go and, whenever I set out for one of these long ones, I always think back to my 16-year-old self who used to dread the timed two mile run we had to do in order to get on the field hockey team.  The required 8-minute per mile pace required, a seemingly insurmountable goal at the time, is now not so scary.  The 16.5 miles, however, takes about as much mental cheer leading as you might imagine.  I mapped out my route.  A lap around Sunset Park, around Greenwood Cemetery to Fort Hamilton Parkway and then onward for 3 loops of Prospect Park, plus a little extra, ending up at the gym to force myself to stretch.  Normally I run without audio accompaniment, letting my mind wander to all sort of fun and interesting places.  But today I had this feeling that mental amusements simply weren’t going to cut it.  Cue Ira and This American Life.

I headed south on 5th Avenue, listening to the story of an NPR staff member who, despite his allergy of crab and lobster, eats one or the other about 3 times a year.  The poisoning himself, he says “isn’t so bad.”  I imagined along with the narrator what he must look like with his cheeks puffed out and his eyes mere slits due to all the swelling.  I even acted it out, much to the wonder of those I ran by.  I then listened to the story of Cardinals pitcher Steve Blass who was cursed with his namesake, Steve Blass disease, leaving him unable to pitch a successful game.  It got me thinking about myself as an athlete and how, when I start focusing on my breathing, it becomes heavier, more labored.  Best to not think about it, This American Life advised.  But of course by that time I had already started.  I made it to the park while listening to a fictional story put on by “The Truth,” with the descriptor “movies for your ears.”  What a perfect companion going into my 5th and 6th miles.

The next episode starred Mike Birbiglia with his story of a hit and run accident in which he was hit, and, although the other person ran, he got stuck with the other man’s $12,000 repair bill due to police ineptitude.  This story, although a very frustrating experience I am certain, was so incredibly funny that I had to mask my laughter with coughing fits as to not come across as a crazy person to those around me.  It made breathing slightly difficult, and people gave me the side eye anyway, but the next few miles flew by as I waited to say what hilarious injustice would befall Mike next.  I sailed through an online musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, by Joss Whedon starring the loveable “triple threat” Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible.  And then came a reading by Dan Savage about his relationship with Catholicism and the loss of his mother.  Unfortunately for me I decided to take my Gu at exactly the moment when Savage nearly broke down while recounting the horrible moment in Tucson, Arizona when he found out his mother would die that day of pulmonary fibrosis.  Gu coated my throat and I made a sort of wheezing sound whenever I tried to breath, which was often since I was something like 11 miles into my run at that point.  I thought I was probably going to either suffocate or get Gu in my lungs which would have been ironic given the subject matter at that particular moment.  I didn’t do either of those things.  Water seemed to clear the problem right up but that was the third time I managed to draw attention to myself while running.

Nearing the end of my run I was joined by Dave Sedaris as he recounted the many pets his family had when he was a kid and how, after he and his 5 siblings had grown and left, his parents replaced them with a Great Dane named Melinda.  He discussed other pets he had throughout his life, including his female cat, Neil, who was ill and needed to be put down.  When his vet asked him to think about euthanasia, he immediately imagined the “youth in Asia.”  In his words,

I hadn’t heard that word in a while and pictured scores of happy Japanese children spilling from the front door of their elementary school. “Are you thinking about it?” (the vet) asked.

“Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

And again, I tried to muffle my laughter through heavy coughing.  At 14 miles, give or take, this was no easy feat.  I decided then and there that when the inevitable happens, and I have to put one of my beloved cats down, I too will imagine the “youth in Asia” so as to not have another complete breakdown in the vet’s office like the one I had circa 2004 when my cat Sassafras was ill.  I then moved on to thinking about the parents of funny people.  In Dan Savage and Dave Sedaris’ tales, their mothers were both incredibly funny.  Do all funny people have funny parents?  Or is it simply in the story-telling?  Or maybe a combination of the two?  This little thought adventure made me miss a little of the following story, about Steve Malarkey (real name!) and his creation, Video Catnip, a film for cats which I now want to buy.  I made it to the gym while in the midst of a fictional story about an armadillo.  I didn’t make it through the whole thing because, wouldn’t you know it, my iPod Nano ran out of juice right as I sat down to stretch.

So, thank you, Ira Glass.  That was fun.

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