News

Facebook Nations

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There are always things going on outside the purview of our daily news, our daily download of statistics, that are just as real as jobs reports and presidential briefings and high level negotiations among world leaders. Such offstage movements have always been there. Mostly they intend to be secret, subversive, operating outside established channels and laws. Occasionally they bubble up into our awareness. 

Abbie Hoffman, way back in 1969, talked about the coalescing of distinct “nations” in America (my phrasing, not his). Back then, something like the Woodstock Nation had to be approached on foot, more or less. You arrived at that one via roads paved with various psychedelics, including electric roads of music. The (mostly) shared ideology was anti-capitalist and anti-racist and anti-war and (early) feminist. In the 1960s, the citizens of this “nation” gravitated not just to Woodstock itself but manifested the Nation in all kinds of gathering places all over the country. 

We’ve reached a new iteration of this kind of “nation”-building and it’s caused by the internet. I don’t mean “facilitated,” I mean “caused.” The internet and its massive social media platforms permit citizens to convene without ever leaving their homes or at least the reach of their cell service and wifi. Every once in a while I brush up against one of the alt-nations on Facebook or Twitter. Today I saw evidence of one right out here on the streets of my neighborhood. 

Lest you think this is all a wonderful manifestation of ordinary people rising up against the oppression of capitalism, be advised that to the extent that these 21st Century “nations” are rising up in cyberspace, they are highly vulnerable to co-optation by the very forces they think they’re rebelling against. Maoism? And who built this cyber-marketplace anyway? 

References:

Hoffman, Abbie. Woodstock Nation, 1969, Random House. (Yeah, Random House.) 

https://twitter.com/dailygonzalo?lang=en

What Matters

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When I look at the news–the spread of COVID-19, the national and global distribution of vaccine, the violence perpetrated against black and brown bodies, the turmoil at our southern border–I can’t help but return time and time again to Dr. Farmer’s enduring truth.

And no, it isn’t just a matter of saying “all lives matter.” We have to own the fact that our world is currently built on the unsustainable premise that some lives matter less. That is what we have to face up to and work to correct.

That’s all I have for today. I’ll let these children’s faces speak the rest of what needs to be said. Please listen with your heart.

Breakthrough/ Brokenness

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For all of us who feel as if a four-year log jam has been broken, releasing the waters of American democracy to flow free once again, there are also those who are experiencing their world closing in on them, as its edges collapse and a sense of betrayal gnaws at their hearts. I find myself wanting to reach out to those people, to tell them that it’s not us, but rather the rigid boundaries they’ve set up around themselves that are the true source of their misery—boundaries of gender roles and racialism and religious absolutism. Over the past four or more years during which they’ve learned to deny anything written by professional journalists or attested to by career civil servants, to believe only what one man on Twitter tells them to believe, their world has shrunk smaller and smaller and now…well, what happens next for them?

The deepest misery of my own life has come in moments of betrayal, when a friend accused me of something that only told me how little they knew my true character or when I finally had to acknowledge that a minister I had admired had indeed done something unthinkable. But each time I have rebuilt my life from the brokenness. And this is what I want to tell my Republican friends: Take a minute. Experience the truth of brokenness. Grieve. And then pick yourselves up, look around and begin to believe that those you have demonized and hated stand ready to help you put the world back together again, to build it back into a world we can all live in together. We will never agree on everything, but can’t we at least stop shouting at one another and begin to listen?

Exercise Your Right To Vote!

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Can you see the McCarthy bumper sticker in the background? I couldn’t vote, but this “art” project was my manifesto.

On election day 1968, I had recently turned 20—too young to vote at the time. The voting age was not lowered to 18 until 1971. My vote in 1968 would have gone to Hubert Humphrey, although my preference had been the anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy. I remember my sadness as I watched election returns rolling in on the TV in the common room of my sorority house at Southern Methodist University. Just in case you’ve forgotten—Richard Nixon won in 1968.

I was assistant editor of the SMU student newspaper that year and, with my press credentials, I had attended a Nixon “speech” (read “rally”) inside our campus coliseum at which the chair of our Board of Regents had controversially served not just as host, but head cheerleader. Faculty members wearing buttons favoring the Democratic candidate were barred entry. We published an irate editorial about the matter. We had also editorialized on the need to lower the voting age to 18, arguing that if we were old enough to be drafted to fight a war in Vietnam, we ought to be allowed to vote.

By 1972 I was 24 and a duly registered voter. I backed the losing candidate, George McGovern. In 1976, when the Democrat Jimmy Carter actually won over Gerald Ford, my vote fell into the losing column again as I voted for Independent Eugene McCarthy. The next three elections went Republican, so I lost again. Long story short? Out of a total of twelve opportunities during my voting life, I’ve only voted for the winner of a presidential election four times—twice each for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

I’m hoping against hope to be in the winning column again this year as I cast my vote for Joe Biden. He wasn’t my first choice as candidate, but he is a good man and he will serve us well.

We ALL need to get out and vote this year, whether the “getting out” is depositing a ballot in a mailbox or showing up in person at a polling place on November 3.

Have you checked to verify your voter registration? Have you filled out the appropriate paperwork to vote by mail if you’re entitled to do that in your state? If you’re voting in person, do you know how to find your polling place? Do you know what ID materials (if any) you’ll need to carry with you? Do you know all the candidates and issues?

DO NOT be misled by memes you see on Facebook or Twitter—voting regulations vary by state and you need to make sure you know what the rules are where you live. Only rely on websites that provide official information for YOUR state, YOUR county, YOUR precinct!

Please vote! Please vote wisely and responsibly.

Win or lose, make your vote count!

Verso

What can one girl do? A lot. Your own thing. Listen, World! People on the way up. A certain kind of girl. Anything can happen. A warm person is a happy person. Should you? Why wait? What the hell are we doing here? A dangerous enthusiasm. It works. (…and more)

Experiencing Racism

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Somebody on Twitter asked: “Have you ever experienced racism? Tell us your story.”

There are two ways to experience racism: As a victim and as a beneficiary. I have experienced racism as a beneficiary. It’s called “white privilege.”

And the more I observe the victims of racism, the more undeserving I feel of its benefits.

I am no more deserving than my black brothers and sisters of being able to walk (or jog) down the street without being harassed.

I am no more deserving than black Americans to feel only mildly annoyed when a cop pulls me over on the highways or city streets.

I am no more deserving than they are of living in a comfortable home in a “safe” neighborhood.

I am no more deserving than they are of being able to watch birds in a city park without others feeling threatened by my presence.

It’s been said that America will never truly rise to greatness until we undergo the genuine soul-searching and structural realignments demanded by “truth and reconciliation.” This week I’ve seen a lot of people encountering some big truths about America and who we have been (and still are) as a racially divided nation. There’s a lot more to come. And the reconciliation will never come without uncovering all of the shameful truths about our nation’s history and about how I and others like me have benefitted while others suffered.

It’s time.

You might also want to read my previous post, “This is Not a White Country.” Or this broader take on the notion of “Privilege.“

1960s Déjà Vu

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A protester carries a U.S. flag upside, a sign of distress, next to a burning building Thursday, May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis. Protests over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody Monday, broke out in Minneapolis for a third straight night. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

I got up this morning experiencing a sense of déjà vu that sent me looking for my bound volume of all the campus newspapers from my senior year in college—1969-1970. I was editor-in-chief that year, so there’s a lot of me on those pages, from editorial decisions about what got covered and what went on the front page to editorial statements (many, in retrospect, rather outrageous!) about everything that was going on that year.

There was a lot going on. There was a Moratorium declared in opposition to the Vietnam War. On December 2, 1969, there was the infamous draft lottery. We put out a special issue on the environment in March of 1970. There was also the Texas Pop Festival and skinny dippers in Turtle Creek. But I think what prompted my déjà vu was the memory of our black students’ association (yes, we had one at SMU) and the list of demands they drew up and how meticulously we tried to cover them in the student newspaper. We got criticism for that.

The previous year, in May of 1968, I had submitted a term paper in which I cited numerous political theorists and a few black activists. The paper concluded that white America had long since declared war on black Americans and that black people had every right to fight back, including with violence. I quoted extensively from James Baldwin and even included one citation of Stokely Carmichael’s writings.

There had been repeated riots through the 1960s. We may have thought that the Civil Rights Act and school integration and a few other achievements would fix things. More recently, we may have thought that having a black President would fix things.

Nothing has been fixed. The past decade has seen a vicious resurgence of (never dormant) white supremacy with its constant toxic handmaiden, white privilege. And black people and other people of color have had enough. The current pandemic has revealed the deadly extent of existing economic and healthcare inequalities. The murder of George Floyd forced us to see what we haven’t wanted to see: The heritage of slavery and Jim Crow are with us still.

When people time after time are pushed to the brink, when they ask for and then beg for and then demand change and nothing changes, eventually something explodes.

When it’s a gas fire, you don’t just spray water. You turn off the gas. And until we address the very real structural inequalities that exist within our society, we’re going to keep having explosions. Maybe even some big ones.

 

Pandemic Revisited

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I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about the pandemic that I wrote about in my Recall Chronicles series. I think about how my different characters reacted to it.

One of them denied their symptoms right up until the diagnosis came back. It was just stress, they said. Or the altitude. That was all.

Other characters contemplated the relevance of political action under dire circumstances.

Montagne stared out the window and said nothing, his fists shoved deep into his pockets. When he spoke, his voice was heavy with sadness. “I know,” he said. “It seems like a lot of people are going to die of this disease no matter what else happens. Except maybe for the plutocrats who are rich enough to isolate themselves.”

But what if the plutocrats are a bigger problem than any disease?

Another character finds herself thankfully immune to the virus. And that became another whole set of issues. She and her friend decide to volunteer at the hospital, offering comfort to patients:

There were only a hand­ful of [immune] people who could work without the encumbering suits and hoods and we were issued badges indi­cating our approved status. Most of the other badge-wearers came from the ranks of lower-level workers who tended to sweep­ing, cleaning and trash removal. My heart sank, realiz­ing that in another week or so they’d also be removing bodies. My task was bedside care. I gave people water and helped them with their meals and their palliative medica­tions—analgesics, anti-nausea pills, sleep aids. I held their hands and looked into their faces. They seemed grateful to be able to see mine.

And then there’s the opening to book three (Flight of the Owl), which came from someone trapped in the misery of the ongoing pandemic (you’ve been warned).

September 11, 2126—She takes another deliberate breath and stares at the rigid form, dismayed at how inexorably her friend’s life had leaked out, bit by bit, thinking about how it will feel when the same thing happens to her. And it will hap­pen. If not tomorrow, then the day after.

Breathe.

She struggles against encroaching tears. Breathing is already hard enough. She fills her lungs with the oxygen her broken blood cells refuse to carry. Not moving around helps, not robbing oxygen from failing organs.

Breathe.

She considers opening the door and running away, run­ning until she drops. Out there nothing works anymore. Everything’s broken. Out there smoke hangs in the air, smoke from the fires. Not funeral fires. There were no funerals. She doesn’t open the door. She lies still, next to her dead room­mate while her own life leaks out, bit by bit.

Breathe.

The last time she looked in the mirror, she saw how her youthful face had gone pale and gaunt. The calendar tells her she’s 107 and she searches for 107 years’ worth of memories. She finds a few. In her mind she writes letters to friends and family, the dead and dying.

Breathe.

Dear Maggie – I just want to say how sorry I am that I stole your favorite eyeliner pencil. She hasn’t heard from Maggie in years.

Breathe.

Dear Uncle Bart – Thank you for making me memorize poems. Thank you for Dylan Thomas and ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ I have no rage left.

Breathe.

Dear Jonathan – How I wish you were here to hold my hand. I’ve wished that before but I never told you. I’m remem­bering a poem I wrote in college, one where I longed for a revolution. Everyone called it anachronistic nostalgia but you said it was good. I think about what’s happened and I think it had to be deliberate. I think this is our 22nd-century revolu­tion. I didn’t think it would be like this. Is this victory? If so, whose?

“Long live the revolution,” she whispers.

Love, Kate.

Breathe.

 

Scared

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The population of planet Earth is currently around 7.53 billion humans. The loss of a few million to COVID19 won’t make much of a dent in that. But if one or more of that few million happens to be someone you love or someone who could have made a difference for a whole bunch of other people either through literally saving lives (because they’re a doctor) or through thinking us into a better way of being together (once we’re allowed to be together again), the loss is magnified many times over.

This morning I’m feeling scared.

I’m scared to leave the house because I really, really don’t want to catch this virus. I’m 71 years old and prone to annual bouts of allergies that haven’t been kind to my lungs. If I got COVID19 and had to be hospitalized in the midst of high demand for ventilators, would I be one of the ones shunted aside as too old to qualify? I just found out yesterday that about half of COVID19 patients who are put on ventilators die anyway. I found out today that about 20% of patients exhibit neurological impairment. What if I became too disoriented to call 911?

I’m scared for my son and my daughter and their spouses and my grandchildren and my sister who is older than me and her family and all of my elderly friends who have so much living still to do. I don’t want any of them to get sick. Hell, I don’t want anyone to get sick, but that doesn’t seem to be a realistic aspiration under the circumstances.

I’m scared for our future (and this gets back to the kids and grandkids again). How long will the economic pain last and will we have the courage to change some things that we can now see need to be changed, especially in case anything like this ever happens again? And it will happen again. Viruses are sneaky bastards that only behave in terms of their own survival and propagation. (Don’t be like a virus…)

I try to be positive. Really I do, but I can’t just turn off the news, because not knowing what’s going on makes me even more stressed out and anxious. Or guilty for feeling upbeat when there’s so much disaster out there.

I try to imagine myself in the picture above, high on a mountainside in central Tibet in a snug cabin, all alone by choice, with people bringing me food and drink every few days…

I’m actually in my urban condo. Alone. Not by choice. The traffic on the street has grown quieter. The food delivery people bring me groceries. I’m still reasonably healthy. I have a secure income. I have a place to live and plenty of supplies and conveniences at the ready. I have internet and friends and family and we check in with one another regularly.

But I’m worried. I’m worried about me and about you. And sometimes I’m scared.

 

 

What Not To Read When the World is Falling Apart

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Let me tell you about what I’ve been reading recently. First of all, over the past week, I’ve been reading a lot of news about the horrors in El Paso and Dayton. As well as the continuing horrors in Washington, D.C., and most of the rest of the world.

Just before El Paso and Dayton, I had finished reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a beautifully written dystopia filled with all the horrors that people of color already face in many of our cities every day. It ends on a hopeful note, but on the way takes the reader through a lot of violence and terror and despair.

Last weekend I attended ArmadilloCon, Austin’s convention for readers and writers of science fiction and fantasy. One panel was about what has recently been dubbed #hopepunk fiction. Panelists asked whether readers were becoming weary of a steady diet of dystopia. I’m pretty sure our answer was “Yes. Now what?”

At the convention, I bought two books from an up-and-coming Native American author, Rebecca Roanhorse, and found myself with plenty of time on my hands to read them this week after I fell victim to the latest virus traveling through the social circles my grandkids travel in.

Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning and Storm of Locusts are skillfully crafted stories with larger-than-life characters in a post-apocalyptic world in which the gods and heroes of the Diné (Navajo) nation manifest in some stunningly impressive ways. Great stories. Very violent. Every character morally gray (which is fine). Many of them a very dark gray. And of course, since Roanhorse is writing a trilogy, book two ends with some sense of resolution followed by one of those “OH MY GOD, NO!!” moments that are the mark of the great writer who knows how to get you to buy her third book.

So there I am–sick, depressed, steeped in the eerily parallel violence of dystopian fiction and breaking news. What to do? I thought I needed a break, a different book that would pull me out of my funk. Maybe something contemporary. So I went to my bookshelf and found a nice hardback I’d picked up sometime back and carried it upstairs with me last night for a good restorative bedtime read. I was only a few pages into the book when I remembered what it was about. This was Elizabeth Crook’s Monday, Monday, which begins with the 1966 tower shooting at the University of Texas. Her description is slow-motion and elegant as a dagger. I broke down in tears as I laid the book aside.

I didn’t sleep well.

This morning I woke a bit late and scurried around in order to make my breakfast date with my son and his family. If anything could pull me out of my funk, the grandkids could.

Tacos and donuts and grandbabies. I was definitely feeling better. Well enough to share with my daughter-in-law what I’ve been going through. She confessed that she’d just finished re-reading Pollyanna. Maybe I’d like to borrow it? Tempting, but…no.

You see, I don’t want to just hide from the violence and hatred. I don’t want to cover it over with prettily-painted, trompe-l’oiel wallpaper and pretend it’s not there. I just want to see something in our world, something in us, that can reassure me that we’re more than this, better than this.

Show me some hope.

Driving home I remembered something from my college days that I had worked into the second book of my Recall Chronicles. Malia, the main character in Shadow of the Hare, is alone in a little hotel in India, struggling to cope in a post-apocalyptic world.

“I read for a while, [she says] struggling through a short story in French that Simone had shared with me. It was about a little blind girl whose parents, with collusion from the village priest, had conjured a beautiful and perfect world for her, never let­ting her encounter anything ugly or sad. She was so angry when she discovered what they’d done, what the world was really like. “Je ne veux pas etre heureuse,” she cried. “Je veux savoir!” I liked the story. I don’t want to be happy—I want to know. I made a cup of tea and read it again.”

That story has stayed with me all these years and it has kept me asking questions, never content to rest in my privilege or comfort, always wanting… to know.

Here’s what I know now: I want both. Yes, I want to know. But I also want to be happy. I DO want to be happy, dammit. And I want you to be happy, too.

My job as a writer, especially as a writer of speculative fiction, is not to write #grimdark, violence-filled dystopian and apocalyptic stories devoid of hope; nor is my job to write pretty #noblebright fiction in which saviors magically come to our rescue. No, my job is to face the reality of #grimdark and somehow dig out of it… some shred of hope. Some deeply human determination to hope in spite of everything.

They say we have to write the stories we want to read. Okay, then. If all goes well, my book will be out early next year.

(A version of this essay was read earlier today at Austin Writers’ Roulette, hosted by Teresa Y. Roberson at Malvern Books.)

“This Changes Everything?” (Updated.)

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NOTE: This was originally published in the aftermath of the shooting in Orlando, Florida, in June of 2016. Today I added a dozen more shootings. How many will it take? 

Aug. 1, 1966: A man with a gun shot and killed 16 people from a university tower at the University of Texas in Austin.

Maybe we should change some things.

July 18, 1984: A man with a gun killed 21 adults and children at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California.

Surely, there are things that should change.

Aug. 20, 1986: A man with a gun killed 14 postal workers in Edmund, Oklahoma.

This should change things.

Oct. 16, 1991: A man with a gun crashed his pickup through the wall of Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and then shot and killed 23 people.

Would this change things?

April 16, 2007: A young man with a gun at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, killed 32 people.

Certainly this will change everything.

Nov. 5, 2009:  A man with a gun killed 13 people and injured 30 others at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas.

Things have to change.

July 20, 2012: A man with a gun killed 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater.

This has to change everything.

Dec. 14, 2012: A man with a gun killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Now. Now this will change everything.

Sept. 16, 2013: A man with a gun killed 12 people and injured three others at the headquarters of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C.

Will things ever change?

June 18, 2015: A man with a gun killed nine people at a weekly Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

This is it. This is the one that will change everything.

July 16, 2015:  A man with a gun opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee, killing five.

Nothing has changed.

Oct. 1, 2015: A man with a gun killed an assistant professor and eight students in a classroom at Umpqua Community College near Roseburg, Oregon.

Nothing has changed.

Nov. 27, 2015: A man with a gun attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing a police officer and two civilians.

Nothing has changed.

Dec. 2, 2015: A married couple with guns opened fire at a San Bernardino County Department of Public Health training event and holiday party, killing 14 people.

Nothing has changed.

June 12, 2016: A man with a gun killed 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

ADDENDA (August 5, 2019)

October 1, 2017: One man with a lot of guns opened fire on an outdoor music festival on the Las Vegas Strip from the 32nd floor of a hotel-casino, killing 58 people and wounding more than 500.

This one. So many dead! We talk about bump stocks.

November 5, 2017: A man with a gun shot up a congregation at a small church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, killing more than two dozen.

At a church? We talk about mental health.

February 14, 2018: A young man with a gun shot and killed 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Finally, change is coming. Such powerful student leaders will push for change!

May 18, 2018: A young man with a gun killed eight students and two teachers at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas.

Another school, nothing has changed.

June 28, 2018: A man with a gun killed five employees of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland.

Targeting journalists now.

October 27, 2018: A man with a gun killed 11  worshippers at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during Shabbat morning services.

Targeting Jews? What can we do? What can we do?

November 7, 2018: A man with a gun killed 12 people at a country music bar in Thousand Oaks, California.

Again. And nothing has changed.

February 15, 2019: A man with a gun killed five co-workers at a manufacturing plant in Aurora, Illinois.

Nothing changes.

May 31, 2019: A man with a gun opened fire in a building that houses Virginia Beach government offices, killing 12 people.

Nothing changes.

July 28, 2019: A young man with a gun kills three people at an outdoor festival in Gilroy, California.

Now? We talk about children.

August 3, 2019: A man with a gun killed 20 people at a shopping center in El Paso, Texas.

We talk about domestic terrorism.

August 4, 2019: A man with a gun killed nine people in 30 seconds at a popular nightlife area in Dayton, Ohio.

Can we talk about the guns now? Will anything ever change?