Vote Like Somebody's Life Depends On It

 

It is not hyperbole to say that November’s Presidential Election in the United States is the most consequential election we have had in many years. Some people might argue that 2016 was more consequential, but I disagree. In 2016, we could still hope that maybe the Office of the President would work some magic on Donald Trump---that he would come to understand the importance of empathy and kindness and compromise and expertise and actual leadership.

 

Sadly, rather than the Office magically changing Donald Trump for the better, his presence has tainted the Office and done actual long-term damage to the country. He has shown himself to be singularly unqualified to be President. To him, everything is about raw power. To Donald Trump, you do something simply because you can, not because it is right thing to do. He is a crude, small person with mean instincts, little curiosity, and no heart.

 

Now that we have all seen who he is, with no room left for interpretation or spin, this November’s election has become a referendum on the soul of America. It will answer the question: What kind of a country are we?

 

To choose four more years of uninformed and destructive policies, belittling language, craven kissing up to dictators, personal enrichment, and the politics of chaos would tell me that America is dead. We would no longer be the country I was proud to represent as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Yemen.

 

If you have watched the past four years and you are satisfied with the job Donald Trump has done, then I cannot change your mind. All I can ask of you is that you stay home on Election Day.

 

If, however, you are eligible to vote and are thinking about voting for someone other than Joe Biden or Donald Trump—or not voting at all---please read the next few paragraphs.

 

Please.

 

Because the future of our country is at stake. If you are thinking about not voting, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE think again. There are many people whose lives will be worse if Donald Trump wins. And by “worse” I don’t mean that their taxes might be a little higher or that there might be some policy changes that make life a little bit harder for them. I mean worse as in they will feel unsafe. I know many Trump fans like to make fun of people’s feelings, but by “unsafe” I mean truly at risk for maltreatment and harm. They will feel like the country they live in actively dislikes them and wants to hurt them. And they would be right.

 

It is no exaggeration to say that we are on the brink of fascism in this country. Donald Trump is a wannabe strongman who thinks the way to be a good leader is to force your will on anyone who will not do what you want them to do. He is ignorant of American history, has no idea what the Constitution actually says, and seems to believe a President should be able to do whatever he wants to do.

 

This is why he sides with bad cops when they abuse their power. You can hear the wheels turning in his head—“If those people had just done what they were told to do, they’d be fine.” This is the argument of people who can expect to be treated fairly by the system. Many people in the United States today have no expectation of fairness from the system—and they are smart to feel this way. The deck is stacked in this country against the poor, against the gay, against the person with an accent, against people with dark skin, against anyone who makes the white power structure feel threatened.

 

If you are thinking of not voting, please reconsider and think about the people who need your support and your protection. With the small effort it would take to go and vote for Joe Biden, you can help protect people who, through no fault of their own, are at risk in a second Trump term. You don’t even have to go anywhere to vote. You can do it from home with a mail-in ballot. PLEASE think about this as you decide whether to vote.

 

If you are thinking about voting for someone other than Joe Biden or Donald Trump---especially if you live in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, or Iowa---PLEASE hear me out. I have to be blunt because this really matters: your philosophical purity is less important than your Black neighbor’s life. It really is. So please consider voting for Joe Biden instead of anyone else. I know it feels wrong and maybe even painful to vote for someone as corporatist and middle-of-the-road as Joe Biden, but, if you are white and leaning third party, please understand that this particular election IS NOT ABOUT YOU.

 

This is the election where you get to prove that other people’s lives matter by voting as if their lives depend on it. Because they just might.

The Murder of Ahmaud Arbery

Right now, Ahmaud Arbery should be wondering if his parents got him anything for his 26th birthday tomorrow. What with the corona virus and the recent lifting of the lockdown policies in his home state of Georgia and the general nervousness about social distancing, maybe his mother and father would not have had the time or the willingness to venture out into the world to find their son a present.

Ahmaud should be having these thoughts as he himself ventures out and takes a run from his home in Brunswick, Georgia, through Satilla Hills, and back to Brunswick. These runs give him time to think. They also keep him in shape for that day when (maybe) he finally takes the last step and becomes a boxer.

Tragically---criminally—Ahmaud Arbery is not wondering anything today.

Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by a father and son who saw him jogging through Satilla Hills, assumed he was a burglar, chased him down in their truck, and shot him. This happened almost three months ago: A black man went for a jog and was killed by two white men who assumed he was a thief.

This happened back on February 23, 2020---roughly 75 days ago. Most of us are just hearing about this now for one reason: there is video of the shooting. And that video was leaked in the past few days. The video has since gone viral and the murder has received national and international coverage. Before the video came out the killing had not made much of an impression beyond Georgia.

This is 2020, not 1897. Black men and women were lynched in the past under all sorts of pretenses. According to the American Social History Project, “Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, for such alleged crimes as ‘stealing hogs, horse-stealing, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of stealing cattle, boastful remarks’ or ‘trying to act like a white man.’ One was killed for stealing seventy-five cents.”

Ahmaud Arbery was lynched because two white men with deep ties to local law enforcement decided on the spot to grab their guns and be judge, jury, and executioner---all in the span of just a few minutes.

And those two white men? Surely they were charged with murder, right? Or at the very least arrested?

Nope. Not one thing has happened to them yet. The local prosecutor has finally recommended that a grand jury be given the evidence and asked to approve charges. Due to the corona virus, a grand jury cannot be convened until June 12.  By then, the murderers will have been walking around free for almost four months AFTER killing a man in cold blood.

If I were a black man, I imagine I would live my life full of fear and anger about a culture and a system where shocking injustices like this happen far too often. How many times do they happen but there is no video so nobody ever hears about them? It took almost three months for this video to come out, even though the local police had it since the day Ahmaud Arbery was murdered.

This is America.

When will it stop? When will White America stand up and say “Enough is enough”? Black Americans are not the problem here. The problem is a deeply-entrenched system with the wrong priorities. Protecting the status quo should not be Job One of law enforcement and the criminal justice system, yet far too often that is the case.

And since the status quo benefits White America far more than Black America, very little changes. Things will not change until White America refuses to go along with the system that leads to such skewed enforcement of the law. The White people of Brunswick and the rest of Georgia need to join the Black people already gathering to make it clear this is not about Black people venting anger---it’s about citizens finally getting mad enough to demand changes.

Far too often, people protesting racism in America are described as anti-American. (see: Colin Kaepernick) Do the people who use that term even get the meaning of what they are saying? They are saying “How dare you protest racism, since racism IS America.” In other words, to be against racism is to be against America.

White America, can we please just stand up and say “Enough. No more profiling and beating and killing in my name.”

I am going to run 2.23 miles tomorrow to celebrate the life and birthday of Ahmaud Arbery. It’s a mostly-meaningless gesture in the end, but it’s a thing I can do with my anger right now. And then I have committed to being more brave and outspoken about calling out racism when I see it in my own self, my own friends, and my own town. Asking Black Americans to end racism is like asking women to end sexism. It has to be White Americans that finally make a reckoning with this country’s deep-seated issues with race and demand changes from each other.

I will not mention the killers by name here. They do not deserve to be known. They deserve to be arrested and jailed.

Update: the father and son were arrested on Thursday, May 7, 2020.  https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/05/07/nation/arrests-made-shooting-death-black-man-after-outcry/

OMG

I have been watching and listening to the impeachment trial of Donald John Trump the past few days, but this morning was the first time I happened to catch the opening prayer delivered by the Senate chaplain, Barry C. Black.

I was floored. I mean, it took my breath away. I could not believe what I was hearing. Maybe I have been away from organized religion such a long time that I have forgotten just how involved in the affairs of humans God is thought to be. I literally did a small shocked spit-take with my coffee when I heard the chaplain’s words.

If I can find a full transcript I will post it below, but in the meantime I have found the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MteWjpOVSqk (Chaplain Black’s prayer starts at the 1:02:50 mark and runs less than two minutes.) He started by asking that God “unite our Senators in their striving to do Your will.” And then went on to say “We trust the power of Your prevailing providence to bring this impeachment trial to the conclusion you desire.” 

My first reaction was, “Wait, does this gentleman really think that the 100 Senators in the chamber are truly striving to do God’s will?”

My second reaction was, “Does Chaplain Black actually believe that God has a desired outcome to this impeachment trial?”

I am sure there may be a few United States Senators who are sincerely striving to do God’s will. On a day when I am feeling generous, I would put the number at no more than 10. A person does not rise through the party system in America and get to be a Senator without a whole bunch of compromising along the way---no matter which party they are in. The twin needs to raise funds and to appeal to the base leave far too many opportunities for ethical compromise for a sitting US Senator to have much claim to “striving to do God’s will.”

But I get it. Maybe Chaplain Black was appealing to their best selves and reminding them of what they want to believe about themselves.

The next part is a little trickier for me to understand. Do people really think that God has a “desired outcome” for this trial of Donald John Trump? Is God a cheerleader who really hopes (and prays?) for things to happen? Giod is all-powerful, right? And if you believe in God’s omnipotence, then whatever way the trial turns out IS God’s desired outcome, no?

There is a real danger in believing that whatever happens is God’s desired outcome. It feels to me like the believer’s version of that pabulum I hear so frequently “It is what it is.” Of course Donald Trump will be found Not Guilty. Is that because it is God’s desired outcome? Or might it have something to do with the political prospects of 100 Senators?

I do not believe in God, but if I did, she’d be pretty angry at what is going on in D.C. these days.

Pointing My Skis Downhill

I have never liked skiing very much. I did not grow up in a family that skied. The first time I went was in college and I was not very good. Then as a 30-year old I went skiing in Montana with Erica and her brother.  They took me way up to the top of a Bridger Bowl intermediate level ski run and told me it would be fine.

It wasn't fine.

It took me at least an hour to make it to the bottom and it was hell. Whenever I would point my skis downhill I would start to pick up speed and panic. I felt out of control. I DO NOT like to feel out of control, so I would snowplow or turn parallel to the hill and slide across the face until I stopped. In this way, I ever-so-slowly got to the bottom of the run.

Fast forward ten years: I am teaching at an elementary school in New Haven and we take our kids skiing at Mt. Southington.  (There are no mountains in Connecticut, so Mt. Southington is misnamed--it's really just a big hill.) The gym teacher arranged the trip each year and I got to go as a chaperone for my 6th graders.  There was no pressure on me to ski, so I had room to go and learn at my own pace and in my own way.

Even given that freedom to learn at my own pace, it still took three trips for me to discover something essential:  the only way to get better at skiing would be to let my skis point downhill. Yes, if I did I would pick up speed and Yes, it would feel scary. But nothing terrible would happen. I could always just turn and slow down if it felt too bad. Or I'd fall. Then I'd get back up and keep skiing.

I got much better at skiing after that.

The underlying lesson—that to get better at something you sometimes have to feel bad at it, (and maybe even out of control), is coming in handy years later.

I recently took up acting as a thing I do. It has been a revelation. I started acting lessons precisely because I wanted to do something that would be hard and scary. And it has been both of these things. But it has also been a way to understand myself and other people better. In order to be someone else on-stage or on-camera I have to have a good sense of what that person is thinking and feeling and then I have to find ways to convey that interior state to an audience using my face and my body as much as the words of the script.

I have been in two acting class showcases, two short plays, and six student films in the past year.  I have liked being in the films. But I have LOVED being in the showcases and the plays. There is something about being on stage in front of a live audience that is so thrilling.  The first time I performed in front of an audience there were 80 people in the crowd in an intimate theater at Cornell’s Risley Hall. Just before I took the stage I felt so nervous I was shaking and my mouth was entirely dry.
The applause for the scene before mine ended and I stepped out onto the stage. I took a deep breath and let the words of the script take over. Before I knew it, the scene was done, people were clapping, and I left the stage. I have no specific recollections of my five minutes performing the scene. The script and the scene had a gravity of their own—just like a ski run—and I had pointed my skis downhill and let them take me.

It was exhilarating.

In my three chances to be on stage since then, the same thing has happened each time. I work very hard to memorize my lines, so that when it is time to go, I don’t have to think about them at all. I also work hard to come to an understanding of who the character is that is speaking the lines. These characters are not me so when the gravity hits it can’t just be me up there saying lines. It has to be real in the context of the scene.

Once the lights have come up I have been able to turn downhill and let things play out without fear or even self-awareness. I have seen videos of these performances after the fact. They’re not bad. If I were in the audience, I would not be thinking, “that guy really sucks.”

A few weekends ago I was filming a scene for an Ithaca College student film. It is called “Assassin Camp” and I had a small role as a dorky dad who is sending his high school son off to Film Camp. There is a scene where I drive my boy to the college where camp is being held, pull up in front, and get out to give him an incredibly awkward hug. And then, as he walks away, I yell out “Knock ‘em dead!” while I thrust out a big thumbs up.

We filmed the first take and the director said, “Give me more on the thumbs up.” So we filmed it again and I thought I gave him more. He called “Cut!” and said “Even bigger. There is no such thing as too big with this line.” So we filmed it again. And again I was too restrained. Finally, I remembered the idea of pointing my skis downhill and the director said, “let’s just do this ten different times and play with it—go HUGE!”

So I did and if felt great. I had to turn off any inner voice I was hearing and simply be that dorkiest of all dads and then just let it rip.

Being me, I often get stuck in the mistaken belief that there is one right way to do something. Combine this belief with a real fear of being bad at things and you have a recipe for paralyzing self-doubt and inaction. From the outside this often looks like passivity or an unwillingness to actually do anything. My experience of these moments where I really want to be taking an action or trying a new thing is anything but passive.

My interior monologue runs something like this:

“I know I need to be doing something right now. Why aren’t I doing it? What is wrong with me? Shit? What is wrong with me? Okay—I’m going to count to three and then I’m just going to do it….one…two…thr—but wait, something just changed…maybe now is not the right time.  And maybe the thing is the wrong thing.....I’ll do it later. Yeah—this is definitely NOT the right time…..I will surely do it later.”

It can go on like this for a very long time. Days. Weeks. Years, in some cases.

But now, when I find myself spinning my internal wheels like this, I can break into the monologue and remind myself to turn the skis and be okay feeling a little out of control.

What voice can I write in?

In my 52 years I have had 2 short stories published. One was during my senior year of college. It was called “Postcard From the Past” and it appeared in the Bucknell Literary Magazine The Red Wheelbarrow.  The other came out when I was in my early 40s. It was called “Floating” and it appeared in the online literary journal called Quay Journal.

The main character in Postcard From the Past is a 12-year old white suburbanite boy. He is not the narrator, but it is his point of view we are inhabiting. Floating takes the perspective of this same character twenty years later. Both are fictionalized versions of me—a middle class white guy raised in suburbia in the 1970s and 1980s.

I have had an easy life. That’s not to say things haven’t gone bad sometimes, but my baseline has always been a place of security and support and belonging. I have never questioned my value in modern American society. In other words, I was born already on second base and I didn’t even know it.

When I write, it is most often non-fiction and the voice is clearly my own. Sometimes, I am inspired to write fiction. Usually the people I write about are white middle class people very much like me and my family and friends.  But every once in a great while a different voice will come out of my head and onto the page.

Sometimes it is a woman, telling her story. One time, the story was from the perspective of a Yemeni villager. Once, it was a dog. I don’t know where the inspiration comes from when these voices spill out of my head and onto the page. I just know that they are sometimes there and they are insistent.

And when I do write from the perspective of a Yemeni man or a woman who sings at funerals at a small Catholic church in Wilmington, I do not write with a political agenda. The first draft is always a sputtering struggle to find the right voice—the real person—who wants to come out. The story comes first and the character walks around in my head and in the story until they either seem real or they fade away because I couldn’t quite find out who they wanted to be.

I read this week about a man whose poem “How-To” appeared in The Nation. The poet is a white man. Some of the lines in his poem are in Black Vernacular English (BVE.) Some readers were offended by this white author’s use of BVE and he and the poetry editors of The Nation apologized for its publication and any hurt it may have caused.

I have not read the poem. I don’t read much poetry, to be honest. But the incident has gotten me thinking about the job of a writer. A writer’s task is to get at the truth somehow. Sometimes that means a haiku. Sometimes it means a memoir. Sometimes the truth is found in a novel or a short story. The characters who appear in all of these works have a voice and a point of view. For me, sometimes the only way for me to know how I really feel about something is to write it out. Ideas can kick around my head without scrutiny for a long time.

It’s when I see them on the page in front of me that I know if they are true or not.

And the truth of the words doesn’t necessarily depend on a one-to-one correlation between my age/sex/gender and that of my characters.

 If a Yemeni villager were to read the story I wrote telling the story of a Yemeni villager, he might laugh in my face at how wrong it all is. He might want to hit me. And those reactions would be warranted. If a woman were to read my story about the funeral singer and shake her head at how wrong it all is I would want to hear what I got wrong and ask for her help in understanding better.

Some of the value of reading fiction surely comes from the opportunity to get inside the hearts and minds and lives of people other than ourselves. We have a magical chance to become intimate with people we would otherwise never meet. I do not want to be told what books I can read and which characters I am allowed to get to know and which I am not.

I also don’t want to be told who I can write about and who I can’t. That is up to me. If I do a terrible job, tell me. Rip up my story. Tell everyone else how shitty it is and how wrong it gets everything. But don’t tell me I can’t use a different voice. That is what writers do.