Saturday, November 16, 2013

I made it through "Reign of Error"

I avoid reading too much Diane Ravitch, or other school reform politics, because it makes me want to run screaming through the streets until I fall down. A combination of outrage, incredulity, impotence, WTF!!!!, sadness, despair.  Kind of like how I felt sitting in the Ross Business School multi-whoknowshowmuch$ auditorium on MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY and listening to Adrian Fenty (stunned disbelief fueled my footsteps to this presentation, that one of the proponents of closing schools serving black students was considered a worthy invitee to a symposium on social justice) discussing those darn uneducated black parents who didn't know what was good for them and their kids when they voted him out of office in D.C., and the room full of "I've-not-been-inside-an-actual-classroom-since-I-was-filling-out-dittoes-but-it-probably-is-still-the-same" rich Ross school alums who were shaking their heads and wringing their hands over oxen-headed-teachers, "How CAN we convince them to participate in professional development?? WHY are teachers so resistant to growing and learning?" I was holding a microphone, waiting to be called on, seething several different colors, but Mr. Fenty (wisely?) never acknowledged me.  I left with flames shooting out of the top of my head and texted about a zillion swear words to Michael about how the Democratic Party has calculated the pluses and minuses of throwing teachers and unions to the wolves in order to gain corporations and hedge fund managers, and decided us lunch-box-toters can all go fuck ourselves. The ten or so texts detailing my epiphany may not have been the best decision in terms of my relationship but kept my head from melting, so there's that.

So, Diane Ravitch. I appreciate that she is talking, and doing what I'd like to do except I am too emotional to stay on topic for that long.  I still have to get up in the morning with emotional energy to love my students, and teach, and not give up. I can't take much more than a few tweets of hers at a time and still walk into work with a sense of hope. This makes me feel a bit of a shirking ostrich, since I do point to her as someone who is saying something about education that I can get behind, something educated and reasonable, and I should actually be able to talk intelligently about what she says, right?  So I agreed, with some relief/anticipation to join an online group of my friends reading her newest book, Reign of Error. The camaraderie will keep me from despair, and the reading/discussion will make me smarter.

Within the first few minutes I knew I was in trouble.

Reading this is like reading the legislative news for my monthly union reports. It is like watching the brightest students in my school leave for race-segregated charter schools. Like listening to Adrian Fenty and a room full of season-ticket holding, non-Hyundai driving Ross alums tell me how I suck and am greedy for making $60k/yr. It is all of the worst parts of my job, except it is in my home and I am reading it before bed as I try to calm down or over my dinner I'm eating at 8 pm because that's when I got home from work. It makes me sad, and mad, and I don't know what to do about it.

I'm trying to keep some of David Kennedy's ideas in my head as I read, his insights from Don't shoot, where he is talking about how deeply the two sides of the urban crime debate misunderstand each other, and how if they can set aside their convictions that the other side is a soulless monster and just talk and listen to each other, for real, they find that they have much in common, differing only in procedure, and can find ways to come together to create real change. Not so much by compromise as by looking squarely at what each side is best at, and figuring out ways to use those strengths together instead of against each other.

I'm trying. Trying. It's the only thing getting me through, thinking that there must be some reformers who legitimately believe they are doing good, and not just smashing two hundred years of painstaking incremental work to make a quick profit.

If you can help me in this endeavor, please speak up :)

Some highlights from the book - things that caught my attention or I want to remember:

"In 1994, [Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers and one of the founding fathers of the charter school movement back when it was an innovation of the public school system instead of a competitor], learned that the first charter school in Michigan was Noah Webster Academy, which enrolled seven hundred students, mostly Christian homeschoolers, and that instruction was given mainly through computers. The students continued to stay at home but with a state-funded computer and a curriculum that taught creationism. Shanker was aghast. He was even more disturbed to realize that the academy's founder had discovered a tiny, impoverished school district with only twenty-three students that agreed to sponsor the academy and give it a ninety-nine year contract, in return for 'a kickback of about $40,000.' Meanwhile, the Noah Webster Academy would receive $4 million in state funding for its at-home pupils." From "Reign of Error" by Diane Ravitch, pp.157-8

"Charter schools are deregulated and free from most state laws other than those governing health and safety.  This freedom allows charter schools to establish their own disciplinary policies and their own admissions rules. Deregulation also frees charters from the financial oversight that traditional public schools receive. Some states exempt charters from the teacher evaluation schemes that are imposed on public schools. In Louisiana and some other states, charter school teachers do not need to be certified."

"The Community Renewal Tax Relief Act of 2000 included the New Markets Tax Credit, which allowed investors in charter school construction to collect a safe and reliable returns of 39 percent over seven years...Another federal program known as EB-5 enabled foreign investors to get immigration visas (green cards) by investing $500,000 or more to build charter schools."

"Bruce Baker of Rutgers University analyzed the question of whether charter schools are private, public, or some sort of hybrid. He noted that they are similar to voucher-supported private schools in several ways. They have limited public access in that they can cap enrollment and class size according to their individual preferences; they can admit students only in certain grades and at particular times of the year and are not required to admit students midyear or in any grade; they can adopt their own disciplinary procedures, which are sometimes harsher and more restrictive than those typical in public schools; and 'they can set academic, behavioral and cultural standards that promote exclusion of students via attrition.'"

"Even the lottery system, while seemingly fair, is a selection mechanism, since the least functional families seldom take the steps necessary to enter."

"The idea of vouchers has been on the fringes of education debates since 1955.  That was when the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman proposed vouchers as a way to end the squabbling over Catholic schools...His essay appeared as the country was reacting to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954...States that wanted to preserve racial segregation immediately turned to school choice as their first line of defense, and for many years school choice was widely understood by the courts and the public as a strategy to preserve school segregation."

Chicago's Democratically-led elementary schools far outperform Chicago's 'turnaround schools'

"Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University reminds us that we know full well how to improve schools:
'It's not as though we don't know what works. We could implement the policies that have reduced   the achievement gap and transformed learning outcomes for students in high-achieving nations where government policies largely prevent childhood poverty by guaranteeing housing, healthcare and basic income security. These same strategies were substantially successful in our own nation through the programs and policies of the war on poverty and the Great Society, which dramatically reduced poverty, increased employment, rebuilt depressed communities, invested in preschool and K-12 education in cities and poor rural areas, desegregated schools, funded financial aid for college and invested in teacher training programs that ended teacher shortages. In the 1970s teaching in urban communities was made desirable by the higher-than-average salaries, large scholarships and forgivable loans that subsidized teacher preparation, and by the exciting curriculum and program innovations that federal funding supported in many city school districts.'
These policies were hugely successful from the 1960s into the 1980s. Darling-Hammond points out that 'the black-white reading gap shrank by two-thirds for 17-year-olds, black high school and college graduation rates more than doubled, and, in 1975, rates of college attendance among whites, blacks and Latinos reached parity for the first and only time before or since.'"

How the High/Scope Perry preschool study has influenced public policy

"...when older people remember the supposedly 'good old days' of forty or more students in a class, they are evoking a different time in American history. They are recalling a time when most schools had classes of homogenous students. They are remembering a time before court decisions and federal legislation ended legal segregation. They are remembering a time before students with disabilities were included in public schools and before all but the most severely disabled were mainstreamed into regular classes. They are remembering a time before massive immigration from non-English speaking nations in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. Many of those who fondly remember the 'good old days' were in classrooms that included few, if any, students who did not speak English, had disabilities, or were of a race different from their own. Moreover, even in those supposedly good old days, the schools with many poor or immigrant children had low achievement (far lower than now) and high dropout rates (far higher than now), but this wasn't seen as consequential, because there were jobs available for those who did not graduate."

"The Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education has identified class size reduction as one of the few evidence-based reforms that has been proven effective."

"A survey of expulsion rates in the District of Columbia found that the charters -- which enroll nearly half the student population of the district -- expel large numbers of children; the charters' expulsion rate is seventy-two times the expulsion rate in the public schools."

Peer Assistance and Review - look at this!!!! I want this evaluation system! Talk about making all the players work together. This is awesome. And, totally butting heads with RttT.  This article
Helping Teachers Help Themselves makes the case about how absolutely ridiculous this is - that you have a system that works, increasing the skills of good teachers, improving or eliminating poor teachers, but it doesn't have high stakes testing in it so Obama and Duncan are like, nah, we'll go with the unproven high-stakes testing models, thanks.

There are about 14,000 school districts in the U.S. today, each with its own local school board. In 1940 there were about 117, 000 local school boards.

"The analysis of...(University of California at Berkeley economist) Rucker Johnson revealed that 'black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity.  Now in their 30s and 40s, they're also healthier -- the equivalent of being seven years younger.' "

David L. Kirp "pointed out that after the federal courts retreated from enforcing desegregation in the 1990s and allowed districts to abandon their desegregation efforts, the black-white gap stalled and, by some measures, widened. He concluded that 'the failure of the No Child Left Behind regimen to narrow the achievement gap offers the sobering lesson that closing underperforming public schools, setting high expectations for students, getting tough with teachers and opening a raft of charter schools isn't the answer. If we're serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration.'"

Okay, I finished the book. It is depressing. It could have used a better editor -- got kind of rambly and repetitive. But basically good points. I am not sure how convincing some of her arguments are going to be to those who don't already agree, however - saying kids need stability and that choice and churn and changing schools constantly is chaotic and not good for them makes sense if you are around a lot of messed up kids on a regular basis, but probably sounds namby-pamby if you aren't.  I think the point about how high-stakes business competition is effective in some arenas but terrible for others is valid and very important but it needed a better editor or someone to help her think it through so she could deliver it in a way that might resonate with someone who is, say, libertarian.

A lot of the book is like that - I mean, I get what she is saying about prenatal care, but seriously. I can just hear the scorn. If she wants to make arguments like that I feel like she would have been better off making them strictly numerical and economical - this many dollars into prenatal care translates into this many dollars saved on speech therapy in elementary school. Or something. I don't know. Seeing a chapter on prenatal care in a book on school reform makes me want to run out of the room. It just makes the problem SO BIG. I totally want my country to spend more on prenatal care. Totally. But omg please don't bring this up if you are ever talking to a conservative because I will have a hard time coming to your defense.

And yes, I totally believe that every school should have a nurse or doctor and a real clinic where the kids can get regular checkups and screenings. And a psychologist and a social worker that can work with both kids and parents. Do you have any idea how many emotionally disturbed kids are in the public schools? How many kids are dealing with complete chaos in their lives, everyday? Hint: way more than you see at work among adults sifted out for competency. Think more along the lines of what you see on public transportation. Except these are kids who are told where to go & what to do, not adults who can seek out help. But I also do not believe I will ever see that in my lifetime. Because socialism. 

Things I did like:
-new ideas in teacher evaluations: unions and administration working together to help struggling teachers get better or move on
-enough already with the frickin' testing. diagnostic only. or teacher-designed, for use in that classroom, non-standardized assessments.
-charter schools playing by the same rules as public schools for the most part, if they want public money (i.e., accountable and transparent, similar student populations, oversight, and no profit-making from taxpayer money).
-aggressive preschool programs, ones that actually do what research has shown is effective (trained teachers, appropriate curriculum, tiny classes)
-all schools should look like what rich schools look like, in terms of curriculum, staffing and class size
-quit lowering standards for teachers and administrators and insist on educational certification and training
-democratic control!!
-desegregation
-return to federalism, thank you very much

I don't know that anyone will actually hear or read anything in this book, but maybe. maybe. maybe its nearing time for the pendulum shift? i really hope so.


Monday, August 19, 2013

The imaginary argument

I am discovering this week that I am not the only one who does this. Surprise, surprise - my mother does it. But I also read this, in a book from 1946!! --

“You know, Lillian, someday I will sit down and write a little dictionary for you, a little Chinese dictionary. In it I will put down all the interpretations of what is said to you, the right interpretation, that is: the one that is not meant to injure, not meant to humiliate or accuse or doubt. And whenever something is said to you, you will look in my little dictionary to make sure, before you get desperate, that you have understood what is said to you." Ladders to Fire, Anaïs Nin 

Sidenote: I am not altogether sure why the dictionary is Chinese, and the Internet was only offering me the fact that the Chinese have been writing dictionaries longer than maybe anyone else, like way before Christ, (Europeans: 1600 something years after Christ). I couldn't find any other example of other writers referring to Chinese dictionaries in some special way, like "picture dictionary" or "foreign language phrase dictionary" or "Chinese checkers." But this book has all sorts of bizarre racist references, (like in the freakin' fourth sentence on page 1) so maybe this is one that is just flying over my head. Maybe she is trying to emphasize how different Lillian's language is from everyone else's (you speak CHINESE, for God's sake)? I don't know. But after some diligent effort, if I still don't understand something, or if it sounds like it is a racist anachronism, I feel I have grounds to ignore it. And ignoring that one term, I understand exactly what this passage is about, because I do it all the time, maybe everyday.

My mom was talking about being driven mad by some self-help tape with subliminal messages, and I was thinking, she's having the imaginary arguments, too. 

My imaginary arguments, however, don't start from praise or compliments. I usually don't argue with compliments, unless they are about my job - I guess my first reaction when I hear praise about my work is to look for an alternate explanation of why the speaker is flattering me, since whatever he or she is saying cannot be accepted on face value. But I think I can at least most of the time accept compliments about non-work things.

My imaginary arguments usually start from my own actions. I do something, often something that I know on some level is good for me, or healthy. I draw a boundary. I say no. I make a "selfish" choice. I see that someone wants something from me, I think about whether I can give that person what they want, and then whether I want to give that person what they want, and I decide not to give, even if I am able to give.

That's when the imaginary argument begins.

A friend was talking about this over dinner this week, about how glorious boundaries are (we toasted them!) and how difficult it is to not succumb to the guilt that arises when we choose not to give something of ourselves. If someone asks, and we have it, we owe that person whatever it is we have that they want, right? Because he wouldn't ask if he didn't need it, and who are we to deny him, to deny someone in need? If someone has two cloaks, he should give one to someone who has none. If someone asks for your cloak, you are supposed to give him your shirt also. To keep the thing (time, money, goods, labor) to ourself, is selfish. She asked. She knows we have it. To keep it from her is mean, spiteful - it rubs salt in the wound by emphasizing that we have and she does not. Right?

Except of course this is doom. You cannot give to everyone who asks. You cannot without going mad yourself. Without becoming that caricature of woman we all loathe, the martyred mother, the woman who has sacrificed everything, who asks for nothing, who sucks all the joy and life out of a room because she cannot say, has refused for decades to say, "No. This is mine alone." Because the self will rebel, it will take back what has been lost, in a terrible unquenchable retribution, if you don't keep it sane, steady, by respecting its needs for separation, for the right to not give, for boundaries.

My therapist and I had a fight over her saying to me, "The point of a relationship is not to make the other person happy." Of course it is, I said. That is exactly the point of a relationship, to make the person you love happy. No, she said. The point of a relationship is the relationship - to be in a relationship with another person, while still being separate. About 45 minutes later, my head was still spinning. How can that be ok? How can that be what other people are thinking and expecting from relationships? How can it be that someone would want to be with you if you don't give them what they want?

So, the imaginary argument. It begins with an action on my part. And then, I begin to fight with the person who wanted something from me. In my head. Justifying my action. Defending myself. Putting words into that person's mouth that are my words, my guilt, my certainty that my boundary has "caused a problem," upset another, made myself ugly, unloveable, not worth time or attention. I am furious, I froth with rage. How dare this person be angry with me (because I should have said yes, I should have given what I had, I owe, I am in debt). How dare this person not love me (because I withheld, because I am selfish, because I didn't love enough, am not good enough, did not sacrifice enough, am a bad person). I hate this person (because I know that I could have said yes, I just didn't want to, it just didn't feel good, but if you truly love someone you should say yes, even if it feels uncomfortable, give 'til it hurts!, because love is sacrifice, and all else is selfish. I hate this person, because I cannot make him happy, and therefore cannot be loved. He is the reason I cannot be loved. If only he wanted less, I could be loved. His wants are the problem, not my inability to say no and to be ok with my refusal).

The actual person is walking into a minefield when a conversation happens in the plane of reality. If she happens to say anything that at all resembles any of the things her imaginary counterpart said in my head, it proves that all of the imaginary arguments were right, and that I am unloved. Not only have I been rehearsing this argument far longer and with more fervor than she has, not only has she just proved how smart I am, how prescient, but also - I am fighting a battle in this argument that she knows nothing about, one that is far more critical to my survival than the trifling circumstance of whatever I did not do or give. I am fighting for breath, for love, for independence, for the truth that I am afraid to believe, that I don't really believe, no matter how much I fight for the right to believe it, that I can say no and still be loved.

But how can I be anything else? How can I not pay attention to the consequences of my actions on the happiness of others? How can I close myself off from their reactions to my behavior? I will become like other women I have loathed, those who are so tone-deaf to the body language and verbal discomfort of others that they march blindly on, stomping all over those around them cheerily, seemingly oblivious to why they are friendless and excluded?

I want to be loved, included. I want to have approval. But I also want to have my door closed and locked sometimes. I want to decline, to refuse, and to not be cut off or have to earn my way back. I want to have my needs met, and to not feel that a refusal from another is a judgement. But sometimes it is a judgement! And the judgement enrages me. Is it ok to set that rage down, to refuse the rage itself? And how can I do this without becoming the oblivious woman, without losing the sensitivity in myself that I actually like? How can I be aware of something without feeling it, when all of my intelligence springs from my ability to feel?

Maybe not everything is everything. Maybe it is just this one thing. I have another post on giving to panhandlers that I am working on, and it is a similar idea I am working on in that post. I guess it makes sense, since all of these struggles are about giving. The idea I am working on with that post is about just making a decision for that moment, and trying to not think too much about what it says for all time. Trying not to let it define my character. I'm always defining my character, other people's characters, always writing the novel that is my life. It is a lot of pressure to live your own novel, because every action and every sentence is a definition of your character. And it makes relations with other people rather depressing and stressful. What does this say about her character? What does this say about who he is?

Maybe it is just about today. Maybe it is just about right now. The book I posted about, Don't Shoot, talked about fundamental attribution error as it applies to crime and punishment. And maybe that's all this is, that I am struggling with the knowledge that I am making an error, and trying desperately to resolve the dissonance by applying it to myself as well as others. Maybe. But whyever I am doing it, allowing myself to step back and give both myself and others the opportunity to do something, say something, elect a choice and not have it stand as our character definition, is both exhilarating and terrifying. I can predict almost any character's actions - in any book, any movie. I know what is going to happen, because the signs are all there. But if actions in the plane of reality don't have the character definition function, then I have no idea what is going to happen, and I can't control anything, not even to predict my own actions. 

I just have this feeling that I would be happier, and less likely to be tearing my soul apart with imaginary arguments, if everything didn't mean something. If moments could just stand on their own merits. If words could just be taken at face value. If choices, mine and those of other people, could just be situational responses to stimuli and not comments on love, goodness, and ultimate value. I just haven't figured out yet then how to decipher love, goodness, and ultimate value, and the idea that this might not be possible; that it might not be an attainable goal to be sure of love, or goodness, or ultimate value, is liberating, and very, very scary.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Everyone I know should read this book. I'm not sure how many books I can say that about.

Don't Shoot: One man, a street fellowship, and the end of violence in inner-city America
by David M. Kennedy

I spent a month living in Brooklyn. I learned a little bit about stop and frisk policing. Not much, mind you. But I read a little, watched a little. There were a lot of cops in New York. All over the place in the neighborhoods I was living in and walking through. Already obvious, they instantly became hyper-visible after the Trayvon Martin decision was announced. I thought about the black men in handcuffs I was passing in the subway stations and the street corners and the cops that were talking to my neighbors from inside of their squad car, calling people from their stoops over to the car. I wondered about the stories behind what I saw - what is going on here? I wondered what I was actually seeing. 
I listened and looked for what the neighbors saw...is it possible for me to see this another way ( Where Am I Going? Project ; PBS News Hour on Fruitvale Station film ) ?

I wondered if there was a role for me. Besides just looking.

I read this op-ed in the New York Times about stop and frisk, and a better way to do things. After all of the back and forth I had been reading, it had a tiny ray of hope. (Here's another, fresh off the presses today, but depending on your politics/world view, this may be just more of the back and forth for you. Granted, it is a reaction to a plan rather than a plan itself, but I hope that it shows that no matter what a plan's merits may be, if it doesn't have broad support, it isn't going to be sustainable. We must learn to talk to each other and come to agreements). Maybe you don't have to choose between racist police crackdowns or third-world crime ghettos. Maybe, just like everything else in life, like equitable education and effective management and successful political campaigns, it was all about relationships. And it led me to this book.

I really think you should read this book. Even if you aren't interested in criminal justice or urban policy or drug enforcement. Or race. Because what the reviews all seem to gloss over is that fully half of the text in this book is directly about race, the same kind of race work that we are trying (and failing) to do well in my school district. And the half that isn't about race directly is still dependent on understanding race. But this is not a racial diatribe. This is not a frothing editorial about what someone else should do. It is just practical advice about how to fix problems, explanations and details about real cases that have worked and failed and analysis of why. It is about how to take what we already have, right this second, with no extra money and no extra legislation and just start doing huge immediately noticeable things to fix grievous wrongs. 

It is not a wistful story about what we could do if we could just all get along and be Buddha. It is about what we can do right now, even if we continue to be pretty much exactly the same people, and only make a small change in how we listen to each other and perceive each other. It is not magic. And even though the change is actually small viewed from one side, it is extremely difficult to achieve without the group working through it together - which is why we all end up doing the same things again and again, because fighting against momentum is hard. Churning through identical relationships that fall apart for the same reasons as the one before, unable to figure out the lesson we are trying to teach ourselves. Having the same arguments at work until we give up and decide not to care anymore. But like a lot of the ideas that I have been figuring out lately in my own life, very small changes in your viewpoint can create very incredible differences in your experience. And the changes are not impossible at all - dozens of cities across the country have already been doing them. No magic, no extraordinary circumstances. And this book explains what happened next.

There is truth in this book. There are connections in this book. There is wisdom about relating to other people, and that is the kind of thing that makes me super crazy excited. I did not see any of this going in, I expected a totally different kind of book, and there have been several times as I was reading where I thought, "I'm not sure I'm ok with where he's going." But I think that means it is a book that actually taught me something new. Because growth kind of feels like that, uncomfortable. I would like to recommend that you read the first 24 pages, just the introduction, and see what you think. It's not actually a book about one man - the title is kind of dumb. Street fellowship is a weird choice of words, too, although I guess I can see that.  But mostly the title sounds like it was written by someone who hadn't read the book. So read the introduction, and tell me what you think. I'm going to give you some things that were meaningful to me from the book below, but you should read the intro yourself. And then talk to me. Because I really want to know what you think!
__________________________________________________________





"This is not okay. People should not have to live like this. This is wrong." 

C-SPAN book discussion with author
From the C-SPAN discussion: "How do you get the white folks to care about dead black people?... You're not going to. It's wrong, it's outrageous, but so far it's true. So we better figure out a way to do this where we don't have to convert everybody...I've come to believe that this prescription that says 'we have to get everybody together before', is a disaster...So instead what you do is you find the folks that get it, you work with them. That's enough, as it turns out...If you wait to change everybody's mind first, you wait, and that's the end of it."

"Ordinarily those who believe in law and accountability and those who believe in help and social responsibility don't work with each other, don't respect each other, don't even like each other. The cops think the social workers are naive, the social workers think the cops are thugs. Everybody here was on one page..." p 55

"[F]ocused on groups and group dynamics, the absolute heart of the strategy...Are they focusing on groups, putting them on prior notice, cracking down on groups that kill, communicating back to the other groups? Backing it up with services and the community?" p.234

"America has four inextricably linked problems that converge in its most troubled communities. There's the violence that terrorizes many of its, especially, black and minority communities. There's the chaos that comes with, especially, public drug markets. There's the devastation being wrought on, especially, troubled black and minority communities by our criminal justice response to the first two problems. And there's the worsening racial divide that's causing. We can't deal with any of them without dealing with all of them. We deal with them, it's a different country." p 226

"Jim Summey (Baptist minister) says, 'This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. This is truth, the Word, in action. This one thing did more good than all the good works in all the churches I've ever been in." p 184

"It's not about crime."

"But we know enough to act, NOW. We do not have to live with the death, and the hatred, and the gunshot survivors who walk the streets with their canes and colostomy bags, and the young men who say matter-of-factly that they expect to be dead before they see twenty-five, and the warrior-priest cops who go through door after door after door and it never changes, and whole communities of black men going to prison, and whole communities that are unable to get anywhere on anything of substance because people are afraid to go outside, and poisoned relations between those who need each other the most. We do not have to go on like this...We can make our way to a place where we look back at 2.2 million Americans in prison and say, What were they thinking? They did that?" p. 15

"This stuff works, I say in conferences, congressional hearings, police departments, community meetings. There's a long track record now. This city, that city, these other cities. Here's the homicide graph from half a dozen places, look at it, it just falls into the basement. Here are the formal evaluations. It works. It's a fact. But watch, I say. Half an hour from now we're going to be talking about all the reasons it won't work, can't work. We're going to hit the "it works in practice but will it work in theory" part of the conversation." p 209

"Our thinking about crime is saturated with values: with people's convictions about right and wrong, how people should behave, why people behave the way they do, what will and won't get them to change, what they do and don't deserve, what their obligations are and aren't, what our obligations to them are and aren't." p 209

"Let's get through why the way we think about crime now almost guarantees failure. Let's get through why the way we think about preventing crime walls away the most powerful approach to prevention we have. Let's get through why this isn't even really about crime." p 210

"When we think about crime we are almost always thinking about something else, that it's all really about something else. It's about bad people with bad character, so we need to change their character, get them to turn their lives around. It's about how they got their bad character, so we need to change their families and communities. It's about racism, so we need to end racism. It's about lack of economic opportunity, so we need to do job development. It's about weak and inconsistent law enforcement, so we need stronger laws, more cops, tougher judges.
To do something about crime, our most central conviction is that we have to go through other things." p 210

"One of the core operating principles in my work is that, when taking on real issues, no statements of the form Somebody should do something about that are allowed...If we don't have a plan, if we don't have the means, if the plan with the means we have available doesn't deliver the results we want, if we won't get those results at a pace that we can live with, then we have nothing." p 211

"This commitment to going through other things turns out to be a major part of why what we usually try to do, the way we usually think, doesn't work. What we think we need to do is so hard, so expensive, and so inherently weak that our commitment to it virtually ensures failure." p 213

"The logic of the prevention analysis makes it effectively impossible to implement." p 216

"The deepest commitment to going upstream in ways that don't involve law enforcement comes from people who believe in what's come to be called prevention: working on root causes...It's a commitment with profound personal, professional, and moral salience. It separates social workers and public-health practitioners from cops and prosecutors, liberals from conservatives, those who believe in social accountability and root causes from those who believe in individual accountability and criminal justice." p 217

"The insistence that any move by law enforcement is "suppression" puts the new strategies out of bounds by definition." p 219

"Legitimacy turns out to rest on two key supports. One is that people feel that the law is touching them equitably, not as the product of bias or prejudice. One is the quality of that touch, that they're being handled with courtesy and respect. Outcomes turn out not to matter that much. People will accept a result they don't like, as long as they feel that they've been treated with fairness and decency." p 221

Drift: "people don't sit down and decide to become gang members" p 127

Pluralistic ignorance: "everybody in a group believing everybody else in the group believes something nobody in the group believes...Every single gang member may be thinking to himself, I hate this, nobody says anything, nobody knows. Nothing changes. Get them alone -- Killing's wrong -- and you hear what they really think. They never hear it from each other. If they do hear it from somebody brave enough, the group will shut him down, the group still thinks he's the only one, the mistake is reinforced still more.  Matza: Groups are different; behavior doesn't imply commitment." p 128

Fundamental attribution error: "We see somebody do something and we're inclined to say, He chose that, wanted it, it's an expression of who he is, his character." p 129

(As my sister says, just because you do something, or do something wrong, it doesn't mean it is a character flaw. Think about what your therapist tells you about the words always and never.)

" We tend to think high-crime neighborhoods don't care about, are more tolerant of crime...They're less tolerant....The notion that the hot neighborhoods don't mind the death and destruction is pretty close to a blood libel."129-30

"More than 1 in 100 American adults is locked up...Black men, twenty to thirty-four: one in nine...Estimates are that one in eight black men in the country has lost the franchise...One in nine black children has a parent in prison." p 147

"We have taken America's most vulnerable, most historically damaged, most economically deprived, most poorly educated, most stressed, most neglected, and most alienated neighborhoods and imposed on them an epidemic of imprisonment...It is the one thing that will prevent anything else from working, make meaningless all of our aspirations for better schools and economic development and community uplift. Nothing else will work until we fix this." p 148

"The cops don't understand the anger, see only excuses and victimhood. They get tangled up in the specifics...and miss the raging subtext...The community tells them what it thinks all the time, right out loud -- this is a racist plot, the government's bringing the drugs in -- but law enforcement can't hear it... They know it's not true, they know who they are, why they do what they do, can't get the distance to understand and find a way to respond. They never actually engage...They don't say, We know we can't keep the drugs out. We're doing our best, it's just not working. They don't say, We're as frustrated as you are...They don't say, We don't get up in the morning to put black men in prison. That's not why I signed up. We don't hate your sons. We're doing the only thing we know how.  And they don't dare say what they're really thinking: They're your sons, what are you doing about it?" p 152

"Of all the ways that all of this is deeply, horribly, monstrously destructive, this may in the end be the worst: It makes the community silent. When standing against guns and drugs and violence means standing with a race enemy, not many will stand." p 152

"Here is the perfect, awful, searing symmetry of it. Both sides look at the other and say, You want this. You are corrupt and hollow and beyond hope." p 154

"This isn't about racism, at least not very much. There's racism in law enforcement, no question, some conscious, more unconscious...Fixing it, if we could, would not fix this. This isn't being driven by racism. The cops have not, in their minds, turned on black people, written off black people. They've written off the neighborhoods, the communities. I've never heard a racist word spoken in all my years with cops -- never. I cannot tell you how many times I've heard, Everybody in the community is living off drug money, nobody cares, there's no community left. Part of why it's so hard to name and face the terrible things that are going on is that the most usual explanation is racism -- that's where everybody goes -- and the cops know they're not racist, and they are profoundly, deeply offended. It's the end of the conversation, every single time. It's why what many hoped would change these dynamics, having more black cops, hasn't. Black cops don't hate black people. This isn't about black and white. It's about the community of the cops and the community of the neighborhoods. The first has given up on the second.
But it's all soaked in race, simmering every day in our real, toxic history of racism, in the racism that remains. Similar things go on in other neighborhoods, especially Hispanic neighborhoods, and a lot of the dynamics are nearly the same. But the racist history, the long trauma of black America, makes relations between cops and black neighborhoods especially jagged, especially hurtful, especially explosive. It shapes them, gives them different meaning." p 154-55

"Fixing the strained, often poisoned relationship between law enforcement and America's most troubled communities -- fixing the crisis of legitimacy -- is the key to making those neighborhoods safe and undoing the damage we're doing now. It's the key to restoring our collective sanity." p. 230

National Network for Safe Communities: "It says, There is too much violence in America; the impact of overt drug markets is unacceptable; there are far too many people in prison; the tension between law enforcement and communities of color is intolerable. There are more than fifty jurisdictions that have signed up, that are committed to these ideas." p 268

"There aren't that many things, many crime problems, that will keep a community from being able to function. In the most troubled community it's a small number of people doing those things, and the core of many of the worst crime problems lie in various kinds of collectivities -- gangs, drug crews, drug markets -- rather than in individuals. Our official law enforcement response to both the individuals and the collectivities is inconsistent, incoherent, and, on the receiving end, often opaque. A lot of what we take as irrationality, bad character, even self-destructiveness, are in fact reasonable responses to that inconsistency and opacity. A lot more is the result of group dynamics that are both obscure and often unwelcome to the individuals involved. Still more is the unintended consequence of our official response. All sides -- the neighborhoods, the streets, law enforcement -- tell stories about each other that are at their heart deeply mistaken and deeply destructive. But all sides are in deep ways rational, whatever may be appearances to the contrary, and all sides are willing to shift to a new place, if they can see it and find their way there. Everybody, in a real way, is keeping everybody else going. Everybody can stop." p 269

"We sit down, we talk to each other, we say how it's going to be, and we do the work. It's not a miracle. It's work." p 283











Sunday, August 11, 2013

Detroit Police Department mini-research project

What I learned today that I never knew before: the Detroit Police Department was investigated by U.S. Department of Justice in 2001 and eventually put under federal oversight for making warrantless arrests without probable cause, arresting and jailing witnesses, family and friends of suspects without authority, refusing medical attention to those in custody (19 deaths of detainees between 1992-2001 were investigated by DOJ), and suspiciously frequent police shootings (Detroit's rate was double that of New York City). The Free Press published a series of 13 investigative articles from 5/00-12/00 about DPD shootings and coverups, ultimately leading to the DOJ investigation. It was not as easy to find these articles as it should have been, because Detroit papers are woefully woefully archived. But, Michigan Electronic Library to the rescue, it was just extra annoying, not impossible. Your tax dollars at work.

Archer commissioned a private consultant in 1997 to recommend reforms, and the report (which said things like use computers and stop hiring teens with GEDs) was...shelved. Reform is too expensive, Archer said. Detroit spent $124 million on police lawsuits between 1987-2000.

Absolutely amazing.

Two other interesting bits: the police chief during this scandal...is running for mayor. And, the federal overseer initially appointed to monitor DPD's compliance with DOJ...was involved in an affair with Kwame Kilpatrick and suspicious expense reports.

U.S. PLANS PROBE OF DETROIT POLICE SHOOTINGS, ALLEGED MISCONDUCT WILL BE FOCUS OF INVESTIGATIONS

The Report Of The Independent Monitor Of The Detroit Police From 2004

Suspects dead by neglect In the lockups, Detroit police ignored illness

Detroit-Cops-Are-Deadliest-in-u-s-Shooting-Figures-Need-Context-Officials-Say

City-Had-Bad-cop-Warning-Detroit-Got-Secret-Report-in-97

WATCHDOGS DECLINE TO WATCH COPS PANEL HAS SHIED FROM BIG ISSUES LIKE BRUTALITY

Revised-Report-Shooter-Justified-Chief-Napoleon-Ignores-Earlier-Critical-Findings

Cop-Who-Shot-4-Won-t-Be-Charged-No-One-Admits-to-the-Decision

Police-Kill-Man-Who-Couldn-t-Hear-He-Came-at-Them-With-a-Rake-They-Say

Lax-Inquiry-Exonerated-Chief-s-Pal-Mckinnon-Denies-Impropriety-in-Handling-of-96-Fatal-Shooting

Detroit-Police-Defend-Another-Killing-Relatives-Say-Man-Was-Shooting-at-Stray-Dog-and-Didn-t-Pose-Threat

Cop's-Gunfight-Tale-Called-False-a-Detroit-Police-Review-Disputes-Heroic-Shoot-out

1995-Shooting-Investigation-is-Called-Into-Question-Autopsy-Form-at-Issue-in-Clearing-of-Trooper

Police-Chief-Cops-Get-No-Free-Deals-Napoleon-Invites-Skeptics-to-Ask-u-s-Government

An-Officer-s-Record-6-Years-9-Shootings-3-People-Killed-Review-Pending-But-Cop-Defends-All-of-His-Actions

Free Press Editorial

Free Press letters to the Editor

July 2013 status for DPD: 91% compliant

parties-to-fed-s-monitoring-of-detroit-police-both-get-black-eyes

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Happy Thursday

What makes a perfect day?
For me, it would have to have some of the following:
Physical contact: I'm a pretty sensory-oriented person. After a few days of no human contact, my brain starts to go a bit buggy. Cuddles and kisses from people I care about are pretty much my number one goal in life. I think a lot about people who don't have much physical human contact and I worry. I want everyone to have this, but it is so embedded in relationships and it can't be decoupled in my mind. It is actually repulsive to me if decoupled. So thinking about people who don't have relationships in which they can receive cuddles freaks me out and severely depresses me, to the How Can There Be a God point. I can't deal with the world. But I can try to cuddle the people in my life more. So people that I am at cuddle stage with get cuddles, and I get the brain chemicals I need, and this is part of a good day for me.
Food: As I mentioned, sensory. So, things that go in my mouth are a big part of a good day. I go through phases, where I want one particular flavor over and over. This summer seems to be the summer of lobster. So lucky for me, today was Le Dog's Lobster Bisque day. I got a pint and sipped it in Liberty Square while I read my book. I also ate two cupcakes, because today they were on my brain and we have a cupcake shop in town. So, awesome.
Ideas: I like learning things. Today I learned about problem-oriented policing. I'm reading David M. Kennedy's book Don't shoot: one man, a street fellowship, and the end of violence in inner-city America. I also learned what a RICO prosecution is, how to fool a drug test using fake urine and how to tell if urine is fake, what the word 'secunded' means in terms of organizations, what a koan is, that the movie Purple Rain was released in 1984 and that the acronym LGBT is sometimes rearranged for political/ideological reasons.
Experiences: I like doing new things or things I don't get to do often, preferably if I don't have to "do" them in the sense that I might have to shoot a round of pool by manipulating something with my hands and the spatial reasoning center of my brain, but rather "do" it by showing up and observing or enfolding myself in it, like going to Sonic Lunch, reading my book in the square after the concert, sitting in the front window of the bar talking with the waitress about the chances that her boss will let her open the windows, flopping down in the grassy Quad to be in the sunshine, going to Bill's Beer Garden for the first time, and ratcheting the war against the ants that have invaded the shower up from vinegar to straight ammonia (nothing says GTFO like ammonia, I'm hoping).
Friends: Having connections with people is important to me. The more history I have with them, the better. I like meeting new people and making new friends, but I love being around people I've known for years, that know me well and still like me. Turn the "Figure the World Out" senses down several notches, and just laugh and be silly. And when one of these people says something like Kealy said tonight about how fun it is to drink with me, well, that kinda makes my day.
Drinks: I like to drink things! I had three beers I've never had before today. If you get it just right, the right combo and ratio of drink to water to food to activity to preexisting mood, the drinks just add a bit of warmth and tranquility and playfulness.
Stories: I like to tell them, I like to hear them, I like to read them, I like to write them. I got all of that today.
Walking: I like walking around. I like the sense of being in control, I like not having a car to park, I like not counting my drinks, I like moving/dancing/jaunting along listening to music. Car tunes are nice but you can't dance so much. And you see funny things walking around, like glasses of water half-full and abandoned on the curb or cheery dudes hawking Laith Al-Saadi CDs at discounted prices. It makes me feel connected to my neighborhood.
Colors: I like seeing them, wearing them, eating them. If I can look down and see pretty colors on my nails or my skirt twirling or tulips or look up and see the sunset, I am happy.
Music: I'm not a music person. I'm not super excited about new music. I don't think I hear the stuff other people hear. I'm busy listening for a story, or an emotion, a connection to my own history, and when I don't hear or catch any of those, I'm bored. So I like show tunes, and ballads, and dance music, and things that remind me of one of my own stories. I wandered around today smiling like a loon listening to Cole Porter and Oleta Adams and En Vogue.
Family: I was feeling guilty for not calling my mother today, but it makes me super happy that she was reading my Facebook posts and telling me to come to dinner and posting photos of her and my stepfather and nephews making duck faces. I will come soon, I promise! Say whatever you want about Facebook. I'll be in the back corner while you rant, giggling over this picture of my little brother climbing all over the ovens in his bakery in Colorado.
Female: I like being one. I'm probably in a better mood if I'm in a skirt or have dangling earrings or lipstick or all of the above. I like moving in heels, I like smelling like fruit desserts, I like seeing everything first as an emotion and second as a fact. And if that sounds dumb to you then I'd like to invite you to be my opponent for Trivial Pursuit.
Weather: Sunshine. Clouds. Breezes. There is a reason I ran the eff away from Southern California. Actually, there are two dozen. But summer in Michigan is one.
That's pretty much it. A perfect day will have some combination of these things. Today had a little bit of all of them. Laughter wasn't its own list item but it was inside of each item on the list, except maybe food and drink 'cause that would mean choking. But you get the idea.
Happy Thursday, folks. Thanks to everyone who was a part of my day.


Sunday, August 4, 2013

Gifts from my mother

 Today I'm getting dressed up in my new sequined dress, taking myself out to a pre-theater prix fixe dinner at The Russian Tea House, and then to a show in the theater district. I did an off-Broadway and an off-off Broadway, and this was supposed to be my big Broadway show but the one I wanted to see moved to a smaller theater. So it's cheaper, which is fine by me.
And I was thinking today about things people have said to me about my trip. And about me going out places alone. And things I've heard people say about themselves, about being uncomfortable in (fancy places, crowds when alone, fill in the blank). And thinking about what makes people comfortable, or not comfortable, welcome or not welcome. And some of it is how you interpret what happens when you walk in, and some of it is what happened in the past in similar situations, but I think a lot of it is being confident in your own competence and ability to handle it, in being able to predict what will happen and knowing what your responses will be. You can't predict it very well without knowledge, and you can't respond very well, or with the necessary agility, without training. No one is just automatically confident, unless you are completely ignorant & oblivious to the world. You learn confidence by being exposed to new situations in safe ways, and figuring out what your toolbox of skills contains to help you through each challenge.
Which brings me to my mother. Who is kind of worried about me. But I don't think she realizes how much she has done to give me the confidence and the training that makes me feel like I can do what I do. She's also able, in that special way moms have, of completely tearing the rug out from under that confidence, and I'm learning as an adult to deal with that piece. But I really think my sense of adventure comes from her - or if not originally from her, then at least it was strengthened, given strategies and game plans and techniques, from her lessons.
I knew as a kid that my mom had had a big city experience before she was married - the tiny bits I heard sounded very glamorous and exciting. Girlfriends and downtown apartments and dinners out in pretty clothes. But what was really key in how I ended up here, I think, was what my mother chose to do when she was raising me.  She taught me how to navigate the adult world, in a way that was specific to social situations and polite society. She thinks a lot of this part of me came from charm school, but well before that, it came from her.
As far back as I can remember, I was getting lessons in the kind of behavior expected in public. I don't mean that parts we teach kids in schools, the basics about standing in line and not putting your hands under your clothes. I mean about how to handle yourself in situations where you are likely to encounter people who are above your social class. At a restaurant, for example. We didn't always have a lot of money, but if we went out to eat there were rules and expectations. You dressed nicely. You spoke to the server. You participated in the table conversation with adults or you stayed quiet. You learned about tipping (gratitude is always the right choice). It sounds pretty simple, but if you don't have experiences like this as a kid when you aren't "in charge," it is probably pretty intimidating to do it yourself.
I was watching my colleague Dave with his wife and daughters at a fancy Noho restaurant last week, and watching the girls and the way they watched the adults talk, and remembering what that was like as a child. I remember being so exasperated by how much adults talked, but all those hours of sitting quietly and listening were huge in so many ways - they taught me how to comport myself.
My mother was pretty big on dressing appropriately. I had to dress up for flying standby -- "Jeans are for paying customers" -- for school events, if guests were coming over for dinner.  Was I a girly girl before this, because of it, was it a happy coincidence? In any case, it was clear that there were rules about appearance, and that as long as you knew the rules, you didn't have to feel uncomfortable. 
My mother took me places. She took me out of school once to see Camelot at the Fisher Theater, just the two of us. She took me to see stage plays in far flung community theaters across the state. She took me to the library, a lot. She shared old movies with me (you can't say anything interesting if you don't know anything interesting). I saw her jitterbug. She came with me on school field trips to museums and the choir trips to Boston and Florida. She sent me on trips to NYC when I was in high school, and tried to plan ways for me to see Europe (ways that would not stress her out, which was hard :) She took me to teas and parties and concerts, shopping and errands and tours. She took me places - and every time she did, I was learning.
I have memories of dinner parties at the homes of family friends and cocktail parties she hosted and a thousand opportunities I had to see adults interacting in civilized society. I saw alcohol use in ways that were never scary, always comfortable and social. I was given alcohol occasionally, and taught about being careful with it (nobody likes a sloppy drunk, or a mean one). She taught me common prayers and major parts of the Bible and made me memorize them, so I would be able to attend Mass and not feel like a leper. She taught me to make a bechamel sauce, and to set a table (fresh flowers are a sign of wealth). She took me into the voting booth with her.  
There was never anything scary to me about nicely dressed older folks. Being with my own unpredictable age group was always far more intimidating to me. I know I can walk into any room, even if the Queen is in there, and handle myself okay. I might worry about having enough money, but I won't worry about my manners. Know how to dress. Know what is expected, or if you aren't sure, make a prediction based on a similar situation. Stand up tall and smile. Excuse yourself when you aren't having fun anymore. A lady doesn't make her discomfort anyone else's problem.
I hear people worrying about class differences sometimes - I've done it, too. But I find myself doing it less and less as I get older, as I realize that I have much more power over how I am perceived and received than I once thought, and that the insecurities I think the entire world sees, they really don't. I may be making some things up as I go, but so is nearly everyone else, and some of them are looking at me as an expert. I know that part of the motivation behind learning manners is this class inferiority complex - how to keep anyone from finding out you don't belong and ejecting you. People who grew up knowing they belong don't worry about fitting in (fussing about the cutlery is bourgeois). But I appreciate knowing that my manners are what makes me fit in - it is more empowering somehow to know that it is what I do, and not what my name is, that allows me entrance into the room.
By manners, of course, I don't mean just how to eat a fish that shows up on your dinner plate with the head and tail intact (never turn your nose up at food you are offered). I mean everything that goes into fitting in, blending, not drawing untoward attention to oneself but vibrating the good energy inside of you out into the room, making things go smoothly, following social cues. Drawing others to you as a side effect of the pleasure you take in your own company alone in a crowd, rather than as an intentional gambit of pitifulness or ostentation. The balance you do between making others comfortable and remaining intact as yourself.
All of this I think contributes to "being comfortable." I know how to handle myself because of the manners my mother gave to me, this precious gift she gave me of knowing what to expect in so many situations and knowing what to do. Because she taught me that others always have expectations of you, and that to suss out what these expectations are and meet them, or exceed them, is generally a simple matter, often even fun, and repays high dividends in social capital (break the stereotype - bait your own hook). She laid a baseline, and inspired a social curiosity, that I have been able to build on my entire life.
And as much as it bothers her that I want to run about alone and experience everything, she is the reason I am able to do so. There have been so many hundreds of times her lessons have come back to me exactly when I needed them (don't believe anyone who says you can't do something - that's just an invitation to a theme party called Watch Me). And when I see the look on the other person's face, and know that I have just dazzled her or him with my mother's manners, I am grateful all over again.
Of course we all want to be rescued. Walking into the room alone, facing down the sea of eyes, listening to yourself make less than stellar remarks...damn it, who cares? Mannners, shmanners. You could be home eating noodles. Someday some man will pluck you out of your ennui, saying, "Nobody puts Baby in the corner." He'll cover up all your flaws, make up for all of your inadequacies, and allow you to bask in the radiance of skills you didn't execute.
I live this fantasy sometimes too. It's a nice fantasy. Being rescued feels awesome. Someone thought you were worthy of rescue! You have value! His skills are your skills, right? He'll teach you? They'll rub off? Maybe you'll just get credit for them...In a rescue, only the hero has an identity. Who am I, anyway? A noodle-eater. Someone waiting for her life to begin. Someone so pathetic no hero can resist me. When your Charming comes, you may find you don't like him very much if the girl he likes is a girl you don't.
My mother told me once that she knew she couldn't get a divorce until she got over her fear of being home alone at night. When I was considering divorce, my friends warned me that I might never meet anyone else, that singledom was terrifying -- women rotting alone with TV and cats or fighting off hideous blind dates. I remembered my mother teaching herself to be brave, and I started setting tasks for myself. What am I afraid of? What can I do about it? I found all kinds of tools in my toolbox. Shiny new tools I had never used and didn't know I had. And old familiar tools, like my mother's manners, that I had let dull in the box while I was trying to be someone else. Maybe I don't have to be embarrassed about being feminine, or cheerful. Maybe I'm not prissy. Maybe I'm fascinating. I can get myself out of the corner. I don't have to wait anymore.
There's another kind of silver screen romance moment. The kind where Charming sets up the opportunity for you to perform because you are elegant, because he enjoys watching you do your thing. In this scene, you are a consort, rather than a damsel; you understand and appreciate what he is doing to tee up the crowd because you can do it, too. "You caught that?" he asks, impressed.  Two cats, lithe and sinuous, each a bit of a Puss in Boots, mesmerizing the room together. It makes for a hell of a better story.
How much are you not doing for yourself? What's in your toolbox that you aren't using? What pieces of yourself have you lost along the way? What makes you comfortable or uncomfortable, and what are you afraid of?
Maybe you don't actually want to be rescued. Maybe you are your own hero.
You don't need to fall in love with the person you want to be - you can be that person instead. 

Three lists from my trip

I am capable of

Wearing un-ironed clothes
Making toast in a frying pan
Saying yes to an invitation from a stranger
Paying $4 for water with gratitude in my heart
Wearing sequins on the subway
Walking Manhattan in heels
Making friends out of strangers and hanging out with them on additional occasions
Getting to the beach all by myself without a car
Grocery shopping in the big city
Making appointments in other boroughs & keeping them
Living auto-free


Names I was called

Blondie! Hey, Blondie!
Carrie Bradshaw
Pretty little white girl
Meg Ryan, before she got all old & stuff 
White Beyonce
Angel from heaven
Natural woman
Fairy
Mermaid
Model for Barbie, if there is one
A woman with a good appetite


Marriage proposals I received

from a 20something boy so drunk he could barely stand on the dance floor
from a boy on the street I'm pretty sure wasn't legal for wedlock 

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Chrysanthemum tea

It has been many years since I have had this tea. When I mention it to people in Michigan - like the owner of Tea Haus, or random herbalist types I run into at social events - they nod politely and have no idea of what I speak. 
My ex-husband worked for a short time in a Chinese apothecary. He brought this home to help me with my asthma. It is a beautiful tea, flower petals in your cup. May not even be a "real" tea but a tisane.  The scent and flavor are gentle, as you might expect. Pale gold, soft, no bitterness to sweeten away. Just a mouthful of warm air, tinged with the confusingly familiar smell-taste of dried herbs you can't call by name. 
The dried chrysanthemum bloom was packaged separately - it was expensive, so you were supposed to sprinkle it in on top as you brewed the pot.
I loved the idea of flower tea. I loved the process of brewing it. I loved this "medicine" so much more than my steroids and inhalers that made me feel broken, that tasted like disease and cost so much money. But once he left the apothecary, finding the tea was a bit like trying to find a perfume when you don't know its name.
And here it is. I wasn't hallucinating. Happiness is rediscovering the pieces you lost along the way.

Harmonied men

A friend posted this article


http://abovethelaw.com/2013/07/lawyer-apple-should-protect-me-from-my-porn-addiction/

Which inspired me to comment

"Men can't help themselves, which is why women should never be unchaperoned and should always cover their ankles, preferably with a burka. Naturally harmonied men cannot be expected to see girls in tank tops as human beings, as said girls are so clearly thumbing their uncovered noses at biological predator/prey rules. It is best for society if we all simply admit that boys will be boys and women are livestock. One hopes that each girl has a strong father/husband to protect her, but if not, it is probably God-ordained that she become a sex commodity.  In any case, the return to mom-and-pop values will protect more women by preventing their husbands from comparing their over-21 bodies to more youthful specimens and thereby, understandably, being unable to resist upgrading. I have a lot of women friends and they agree, even when it seems like they are saying no."

But more than that, I've been thinking about male-female interactions. Why my default position is men are predators, unless proven otherwise, and even if proven, can always revert back to predator at any moment. Why I always take the woman's side, even if she is a stranger, even if she is not making good choices, I still assume (until absolutely proven otherwise, which may never happen) that any guy involved is out to get her, in some way.

Because the social construction is such that a man ALWAYS has more power. 

But, then there's your personal life. And men you actually know. And it isn't supposed to be about power anymore. Right? But the mental power calculation is still going on in my head. As effusive and expressive as I am, there are still protected little fiefdoms whose existence I deny, distract from, even, by being so emotionally available in other areas. It costs me little to be effusive - it doesn't make me feel vulnerable, like it does to some people. But I'm not sure that that means I am any more willing to be vulnerable than someone who struggles to express himself emotionally.

One of my fiefdoms is my assumption that men don't act altruistically. That they don't truly act out of kindness or love or friendship (towards women) but that there is always, even if I can't see it, even if they aren't conscious of it, some hidden angle. 

Which sounds messed up when I write it out. Because I absolutely believe women act altruistically. And men are half of the species, and there are an awful lot of them, and unless I do really believe, like this guy suing Apple, that there is something inherently beastlike about the Y chromosome that turns men into creatures incapable of reason or compassion or self-control, then I don't even have an argument, just a belief I know isn't right but I know I still act on, everyday, as if I did believe it was right.

And I wonder, how much of this action on this belief I know isn't right, is an attempt to get approval, a pat on the back for being "smart," a round of applause from the female chorus, the matriarchal archetypes that question any trust I put in any man, any benefit of the doubt given, any relaxation of demands? Not real women, this chorus, though sometimes real women will deliver their lines. But the part of you that is suspicious. That refuses to trust. That is determined to be strong, inviolable. It's a good part of you - it's a good part of me. It stiffens my backbone when I am facing a strange man in an alley. It pools my experience with so many many other women's experiences, giving me stories to warn me and teach me and keep me safe. It sends me off on adventures, alone, to seek my fortune, because my gender is no reason I, too, cannot explore. It keeps me from cowing, when there is also a part of me that longs to let go and have someone else take over.

But this part of me is insatiable. It never is pleased, it never says, "Well done," and it never accepts any man's efforts. Maybe you don't have a part of you like this, but mine looks Artemis-fierce, coven-powerful. I assume everyone has something like this, but maybe yours looks different. But my problem now is, how do I turn it off?

For the coven's advice is not always correct, and Artemis is a virgin for a reason. And if I cannot look beyond this one part, this female power that has no room for the masculine, nor belief in its goodness, how can I progress? How can I bring my unspoken beliefs upon which I act into harmony with what I know to be true? 

My therapist has been telling me that I need to make fewer decisions with my head, and more with my gut. Which freaks me out a little because of course I want to, need to, be smart, be a scientist, be intellectual. But she isn't talking about financial decisions or health decisions - she's talking about decisions in how I interact with other human beings. And she says my "gut" decisions in these cases, the choices I make in the moment, are sound. It is my head, the questioning, the second-guessing, the worrying about whether a decision is strong, is noble, is considerate, is approved - that wears me down, wears me out, sets up battles for me against evil men who must be vanquished.

Psyche did listen to her sisters. She did follow their advice, against the wishes of her husband. The story hinges on this, and her ending would not have so happy if she hadn't - she would have remained ignorant, and undeveloped, and mortal. Probably overwhelmed by her husband, maybe bitter in the end. But she did listen to her sisters and follow their advice, and progress. She also killed them. I don't think I want to kill this part of me, because I like it. But I would like to master it. I dreamt the other night that I was Sherlock Holmes and I was fighting a Kraken. The secret was popping out its bulgy eyeballs. Not sure yet how this helps me trust men but I'm working on it.