Tag Archives: change

How I’m Dealing

26 Jan

This has been a really rough few days, friends. Hellish, I would venture to say. And I am going to be completely and totally honest with you, as I normally am, and tell you how I have been handling it. Not well. Not well at all. Here’s a recap:

Thursday: Trained at a new job from 9am to 4:30pm. I tried to gage where all my coworkers stood on the issues by asking them some questions that I will not divulge here because I am actually afraid that some agents for the government might arrive at my door and whisk me away under the cover of night. That’s where we live now, folks. After work I headed off to a bar that my friend works at and had a few very necessary drinks in preparation for the end of the free world.

Friday: Trained again at the job. This time for 12 glorious hours. The benefit was that this allowed me to entirely miss all the fracas surrounding the inauguration of Tr*mp or, as my friend Ben suggested we call him, SCROTUS. My friends Emily and James came into town so that was great, but there was still just a very heavy gloom that hung over everything. When I got home that night I turned on The Internet, read a few things and cried myself to sleep.

Saturday: Women’s March day. I went to the march with Emily, James and Emma. I wore my “unpresidented” shirt (thanks Beth!) and we all carried signs. I would like to acknowledge here that there were some problems with the marches in general (underrepresentation of POC being high on that list and something I will get into in another post because it is way too important to be just a talking point in an overview) but overall it was nice for me to be in the company of friends and surrounded by a bunch of badass women and men who disagreed with the inauguration of SCROTUS and were just as apprehensive of what the future would likely hold. This was especially important for me seeing as how I just moved to a new city and lack the sort of support system I had in New York. Also, the South is different.

Sunday: Had to be at work to train at 8am.  At a restaurant. I know, I know. But the people must have brunch, after all. It was a really hard day. I hadn’t slept enough, but I had certainly read a lot about what all has been going on. I had the time to have conversations with a lot of good friends who feel similarly to me and it was all just crashing down. The reality of it all. Like a giant, horrible wave teeming with dead sea creatures who could no longer survive in the increasing temperature of the oceans. The shift was awful. Not because of my coworkers or the managers, who are all lovely, but because everyone is politically charged these days, and down here a lot of people voted for Tr*mp. It isn’t like in New York where those people are few and far between. They are everywhere here. Especially when you work in a restaurant that is in a highly touristed area and has a lot of domestic tourists from cities and towns that are significantly less progressive than New Orleans. There were some things said. Like the young white women who insisted that women (read: them and the white women they know) already have equal rights and what the fuck were all those idiots marching for. (I summarized.) I had to keep my mouth shut. It felt like my soul was just melting. Luckily Emily and James were still in town so I was able to run to them after work and decompress. I also called my dad and started crying on Canal Street amongst all the normal New Orleans revelers. No big deal.

Monday: I woke up crying and basically didn’t stop all day. I tried to quit my job because I felt like everything was horrible and I wanted to just hide in my house forever. My managers would’t let me quit, though. Apparently I’m okay at my job. Who knew. But in the process of trying to quit I entirely lost my shit in front of not one but TWO managers at work and, if my estimates are correct, about a third of my coworkers and now I feel sort of like a crazy person. Lots of tears, lots of eyeliner running down my face. Great first impression, Rebekah. Luckily my friend Carie is awesome and I called her and we spent the day doing fun things interspersed with me crying. By the end of the day it dawned on me: there was a good chance that, for the next four years, whenever I wasn’t otherwise occupied (or even sometimes even when I was) I would likely be crying. That seemed to me rather unsustainable.

Tuesday: Woke up still feeling like everything was totally fucked. Kept reading The Internet and panicking (but at least I wasn’t crying?). Carie and I ran some errands which helped to take my mind of our impending collective doom. I was supposed to go to running group but didn’t because I am pretty sure I had cried out the entire salt content of my body and was exhausted. I went to bed early.

So, I mean, needless to say if you are wondering how I have been handling all this the answer is, as I said before, not well. I have sat down to write about 5 different blogs in the past few days and nothing comes out how I want it to. I think that is partially because I am so overwhelmed with the onslaught of information and, honestly, an intense feeling of loss. It is like I am in mourning. And, you know what, I am. I am in mourning for the world I thought that I lived in now that I live in one that operates under a completely different set of rules, if we can even call them that. Here’s what I realized (with a lot of help from friends) and how I am going to operate going forward.

I cannot longer assume that I live in the same reality that I always have. Our government operates largely through precedent and the moral foundation of those who work within it. Regardless of whether we agree with the politics and whether we feel the person him or herself is of good moral character, there was a general area in which people operated, and that area was largely predictable and normalized. We might not agree with it, we might find the actions themselves morally bankrupt, but there was still, for lack of a better phrase, a general code of conduct within which people operated.

That is no longer the case. The code is gone.

We have been shown, throughout the campaign itself and now during these first few terrifying days, that Donald J. Tr*mp does not abide by any code outside of whatever one is guiding him in that particular moment. And for those of us, myself included, who believed that there was something codified in law that required a certain level of behavior, there is not. So all those times we scream

But how can he do this? Can he really do this?

The answer, it seems, is that he can. The rules of the game have changed. He can remove information from government websites regarding climate change and LGBTQ issues as if they no longer even exist. He can demand that the National Park Services stop tweeting from their official handles, but he cannot stop them from making a new one that is not associated with the government, and he cannot stop the 1.8 million followers and counting from supporting that action. He can appoint cabinet members with little to no relevant experience and they can somehow get questioned and confirmed regardless of the fact that many of them have not yet passed ethics screenings. He can become President of the United States of America without releasing his tax documents and he can repeatedly say that the only people who care about that information are reporters, which is patently untrue. I am not a reporter and I would like access to those documents. He can shut down the media and send us all into a tizzy with these fucking “alternative facts” which makes us doubt every single bit of information that we read. If this administration is known for one thing, it will be known for the number of synonyms for the word “lie” it uses on a regular basis to justify the man that they, and Russia, and James Comey, and all those fucking white people, empowered.

Our President, is a man who has never heard the word “no.” People have said it to him I’m certain, but he has never heard it. “No” is simply not a word that applies to Donald J. Tr*mp. And when you have a man for whom the word “no” doesn’t apply, you have a man who can not compromise, you have a man with a huge temper, you have a man with the social mentality and awareness of a 5-year-old. That is who we are living under. We are living under a 6’3″, 240-pound toddler who pouts and stamps his feet at the mere smell of any sort of negative feelings cast in his direction. And yet he is quite possibly the biggest bully to ever darken the doors of the Oval Office.

So no, this is not normal. But it is even less normal than we previously thought. There are no rules, there are no precedents, there are, it seems, no laws that can touch Donald Tr*mp. And so then the question becomes:

What do we do now?

We cannot use the normal routes, we cannot take the same actions, we cannot think this will change or our displeasure can be registered in the same ways they have always been because this is not the same reality. This country will never be the same. We will never be the same. It’s as if we have been living in a world with a ground that is made of rubber, only before we thought that it was made of steel. And he is pushing that ground, stretching it, and we are all off balance and we have to walk differently. Because you cannot walk the same way on something that moves and changes and thins out as you can on something strong and flat and secure. So again I ask,

What do we do now?

And honestly, I don’t really know. I wish I fucking knew. But for me just wrapping my head around the fact that everything is different, and that I mean that word everything to be all encompassing, is helpful. Because it means I have to open my mind and stretch it and challenge it to respond to all the changes that are coming at me, at all of us. Because we, friends, have brought knives to an unregulated gun fight. So we have to be smarter and quicker and we have to use our bodies to keep coming at them again and again and again. And honestly, as much as I loved to hear Michelle Obama say “when they go low we go high,” there is no low or high anymore. There are those with morals and those without morals and those are two completely unrelatable realities. There are those who care about the future of the world and those who care only about the immediate future of themselves.

So, what do we do? Seriously, what do we do?

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An Open Letter to a Developer

16 Oct

Dear Ryan Pedram,

Hi, my name is Rebekah and I live down the block from the luxury condominiums you are currently constructing. Let me tell you a little bit about myself and my street. I have lived on this block for over 10 years now. Even still, even with all these young kids from where ever they are coming from moving into Brooklyn in droves every month and saying they are “from” here, I don’t think I can actually call myself a New Yorker. It never feels as though I have been here quite long enough to call this city my own without feeling like an impostor. Even still, I love my block and it is more my home than probably anywhere else. Despite what people say about the anonymity and lack of community here in New York, I know my neighbors if not by name then certainly by face. I wave at them and chat with them when I go about my day and they notice when I leave on some adventure or other for an extended period of time; they notice when they haven’t seen me running in a while; they just notice. Well, those who are left do, anyway. See, my block has changed quite a bit in the past few years. It seems like every few months one of those familiar faces is forced to sell their property under the pressure of constantly rising property taxes and in response to the threats made by developers like you.

Now listen, I am not going to sit here and pretend like my arrival over 10 years ago wasn’t a canary in the mine shaft to some of the people who have lived here for decades, generations, even. When young, white kids start moving in, you know shit is about to change. I did my best to respect the place I was moving to, the neighborhood that existed before my arrival. I never once acted, like so many newcomers do, as though I “discovered” something. Talk about some language reminiscent of colonialism, ya know? I know now that my young, privileged face read as an upcoming rent hike to those that lived here then. Like the beginning of the end. Like gentrification (which it was). To those people, I apologize. Seriously. I know it doesn’t make it better but I am truly sorry. Even with what followed: all the new faces, the new bars, the coffee shops, the thrift stores, the bike shops, the bike shops, the bike shops — all the trappings of Hipster New York that have made Brooklyn a brand and paved the way for a Banana Republic to open on Fulton Mall (like, what?!) — this neighborhood has, in many ways, remained itself: low key and unassuming. A lot of the people on my block have managed to hold on.

But now the new New York that has been plaguing neighborhoods all over the city, but most notably Brooklyn, has arrived here. (Thank you for that, Bloomberg.) And you are responsible for the building currently going up on my block. This past spring and summer, men in suits descended on my street, trying to buy up whatever buildings and lots they could. A house that had gone down during Sandy, one which was never cleared away, suddenly looked like dollar signs. Buildings with residents — houses where people lived — were condemned by the city and those people forced out to look for new housing in a place where rent prices seem to climb by the second. Then those houses were leveled. And then silence. Until this past week.

This week has been horrible. I, like many people I know, live an off-schedule. I am a bartender and a writer. I keep odd hours and I work from the table in my (usually relatively quiet) kitchen. I understand that I cannot expect the world to kowtow to my abnormality. But the construction has made my home absolutely uninhabitable. Noise I can handle. I live in New York and share this space with millions of people and I understand what that entails. If I wanted pitch black nights with stars and crickets and to be awoken by birds in the morning, I would move to the country. But Mr. Pedram, everything is shaking. The work your contractors are doing up the block, which, by the way, they said they would be done with by 6pm on Tuesday when I first spoke with them (it is currently Friday at noon), is causing things to fall off my refrigerator, my coffee to dance across the table, my cats to cower, fur standing straight up, under the sofa for hours. When I called you on the phone just now you said that the Department of Buildings had been called to the site 2 dozen times and that this portion of the work would be completed in 45 minutes. As if the fact that you aren’t breaking any of their bullshit regulations should offer me some solace. I mean, I know this is crazy but how about you offer us some compensation? I am paying rent on a space I cannot be in. You stand to make millions and millions of dollars. Do the math.

I am not going to act as though my experience has been any different from, worse than even, the hundreds of thousands, hell, millions of New Yorkers who have watched as their neighborhoods become unrecognizable, as the homes they’ve rented for years become unaffordable, as the mom-and-pop shops they have frequented close and make way for banks and pharmacies, banks and pharmacies, more banks and more pharmacies. And I know, it is a lot worse for other people. My roommates and I are still able to afford our apartment, for now. And I am so incredibly thankful for that. But when those starry-eyed newcomers with their strollers hogging the sidewalks, their cars taking our parking spaces, their money closing our neighborhood businesses arrive, how long do the rest of us have? They will have “discovered” this neighborhood that existed for so long before them and before me and it will start to look like everywhere else.

I know that it is all money to you. But just for a second, can you acknowledge that people live here? More than that, even. Acknowledge that people have lives here. Lives that they have worked hard to establish. Lives that deserve better than apartments that shake because you need to make way for the new hip neighborhood. Because after you do that, after you throw up this shottily-constructed building that, if the other new construction in this neighborhood is any indication, will begin falling apart within 3 years, you will move onto the next thing, pockets lined with cash. And those of us who live here now, probably won’t be able to afford it anymore. And where do we go? Where do any of us go? Where do all of the people — in Crown Heights, Long Island City, Harlem, East New York, Astoria, Mott Haven — go? And how much longer can this really go on? How many more newcomers with money can there be?

I’m sure you don’t have the answers any more than I do. And I am not going to act as though this is something only affecting me and the neighborhood I live in. I know this has been going on for years, that I am lucky to have avoided it so long, that other people, specifically people of color, have it worse. I know that I am partially to blame. But fuck, man. My house is shaking and the only thing I have to look ahead to is an ugly new building going up on my block. Assuming I can still afford to live here.

So thank you for taking the time to answer my phone calls today, for speaking with the contractors about my complaints, and for saying that you “understand and feel for what I am going through.” Thank you, in short, for attempting to placate me. But just so you know, I think you, and all the people doing what you are doing in the name of personal enrichment, are assholes. I think you are all destroying this city. This city that gets slightly less awesome with every single personality-less building that clutters the skyline. And by the way, it has been more than 45 minutes and my house is still shaking.

Sincerely,

Rebekah

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