The last year I worked for the IRS, my team and I were surprise to learn during our annual training that our entire job had been changed, effective immediately. No warning from on-high about a coming shift, just another mandatory briefing via e-learning module casually outlining how our job was going to work from that point forward. I was so shocked when I went through it, I assumed there had been some kind of mistake. But since we were each taking the assorted courses asynchronously I was alone in my cubicle with my confusion. So I leaned over the wall to ask my neighbor. They had not reviewed the briefing yet. Neither had most of the rest of the team. The one team member who had also seen it agreed with me about its content. So directly to the manager’s office we went. She had also not seen that one yet, but heard our concerns and told us she would watch it immediately and get back to us. I called my union president and let them know what was going down. A couple hours later our boss called an emergency team meeting. In short, she was flabbergasted. Completely gobsmacked by the everything different we were apparently supposed to be doing starting last week. She told us to sit tight while she ran her objections up the leadership chain. Meanwhile, the union chapters were talking to each other and preparing to inform the upperist of upper management they had missed some important procedural steps. Some while later my boss received an email titled Cease and Desist. “Oh good,” she thought, “the Union paused this madness until we can talk through the impact and implementation of such a massive change.” Nope. It was from upper-upper-upper management ordering her to cease and desist her rabble-rousing and fall in line with the changes. Good try, boss. Sorry Senior Leadership thwarted your attempt to manage in-line with the contract and advocate for your employees’ rights. So a procedural battle ensued, management rolling back it's changes until the execution of the new job order could be formulated in accordance with our employment contract. What we learned much later (during the many-months-long union-management throw-down) was it all started because some analyst sat in their office for two years crafting a solution to a problem apparently identified from on-high. That’s not all that unusual, but the problem in this case was they didn’t ever talk to any of the people actually doing the job. Not once. No focus groups. No surveys. Nothing. That's completely asinine. How can you solve a problem you don't understand? You can't. And yet many people and organizations try to do just that all the time. Countless NGO's are working all around the world at this very moment to solve problems they don't fully understand for other people in other places with other cultures. And it's not going very well in most cases. Afghanistan is a perfect example of America rushing in to another country to solve its problems without listening to the locals. Statistics are wonderful and numbers can provide a lot of insight, but they are completely useless without context. And to understand context, you have to talk to the people living, working, and raising their children in that context every day. Even more importantly, you have to listen to what they tell you. Fortunately there are some great examples of folks doing just that. A doctor in Boston has been treating patients who don't have an indoor place to live for the last three decades. He has been successful in understanding his patents' needs and treating their ailments precisely because he listens to them. There are also some scientists getting out of their labs and into the streets to advocate directly for changes they hope to create in the world. I heard a conversation this week between some of these activist scientists on the BBC program Science in Action. One person discussed the need for diversity of tactics to create lasting societal change, which is a key point. Some folks need to be holding up signs and shouting through bullhorns among the masses. And some folks need to be in the lab doing the science. Modern society has a lot of problems that need to be solved. And as historian Hugh Ryan so eloquently explained in a recent episode of the History is Gay podcast: it all comes down to whether people are getting the care they need. People who don't have housing need care. People who are addicted to harmful substances need care. People who don't have enough to eat need care. People with medical conditions need care. Traumatized people need care. As a societal collective, we are not taking care of all of us. Our system is not set up to do that right now, but it could be. We could restructure it and I want us to do that. But first we need to listen to all the people who need care and support when they tell us what they need. Listening to others starts with listening to yourself. Spend some time getting to know yourself and identifying the filters through which you process the world. If we all do that, maybe we can stop thinking we know what other people need better than they know themselves. Then maybe we can take better care of each other. Information and Inspiration
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Many years ago I took a sewing class. The focus was alterations. I learned creative and useful methods for taking garments in, up, out, and down. I also learned most commercial patterns are designed with a B-cup bust. That means if you have a larger bra size you generally have to buy a larger shirt, even if the rest of your torso does not require it. At the time, I was thoroughly offended on behalf of all humans with a body outside industry standard specifications. I was also glad to finally understand why I had to alter every piece of non-stretch clothing I ever bought. We are all different shapes and sizes; that’s how humans work. But it’s not very practical (or profitable) for fast fashion to try and serve all body variations in every style it produces. So we end up with a default that doesn’t fit many actual people. Instead it fits the ideal body as defined by misogyny and racism. Then specialty shops pop-up to serve the rest of us who have different hills and valleys going on. Similarly, one way to work or function in the world is not a good fit for every person. On the surface I appear to function quite well in the modern world, but it’s just because I have developed a compendium of coping strategies. Over my lifetime I have created epic work-arounds for managing in society while my brain does it’s non-standard brain thing. In many workplaces there have been great strides to allow people to work in the ways that function best for them, especially in the wake of Covid. Unfortunately, these benefits have been mostly available to higher-earning employees. The lowly service workers we all depend on are still stuck laboring in the manner that best suits the boss. This has remained the case despite overwhelming evidence that happy workers are the most productive. It comes down to whether we think the people working those lower-earning jobs are worthy of job satisfaction. A lot of people don’t think those humans are valuable enough to take care of and that's got to change before we will see any drastic shifts in those industries. We also cannot focus entire on our workplaces. We have to assess all areas of contemporary life. This week I saw a news story about AI generated academic papers. Students are using these AI tools to write their essays instead of spending hours slogging through the process themselves. If educational institutions didn’t require everyone to express themselves in such a regimented and particular way, maybe people wouldn’t resort to using a robot tool to build an essay to spec. Sorry Academia, you brought this one upon yourself. These and many other issue are ongoing, but I am not completely without hope. I am grateful to see so many playgrounds redesigned with inclusion in mind. More and more cities, counties, and schools are creating spaces where kids of all abilities can participate in one of the most basic and most important parts of childhood: playing with their peers. Overall, our present iteration of society is not designed for all people to be successful. Only people who can cram themselves into a particular society-defined shape are gonna make it. Ultimately, that’s not good enough. And that's not the kind of world I want to live in. I want everyone to have the opportunity to live their best life no matter what their body shape is or how their brain functions. We are all required in order for the majority of us to thrive. If there are not enough of us invested in each other, humanity may not even survive. Information and Inspiration
After 15 tries, the Republicans finally voted-in a Speaker of the US House of Representatives. This week’s news followed attempt after attempt, each thwarted by a small contingent of extremists within the party. The very same extremists who supported last year’s run on the Capital. It’s a strange juxtaposition: marking the anniversary of that absurd and destructive attack on one pillar of US democracy while it’s champions frustrate the order of one of its institutions in the present. The BBC covered the current unrest in Bolivia during its Business Matters program and the 1986 revolution came up during the discussion. Reflecting on that, the commentator reminded listeners “no country can take democracy for granted” This feels especially relevant to me as a US citizen. Many politicians seem to think the US government is a democracy machine. They act like no matter what inputs you feed it, the Great Machine will faithfully churn-out democracy. The reality is: it's just a government machine. If you feed it democratic parts and pieces, then you get democracy. If you feed it fascism flavored policies and practices, then you're gonna get fascism. This is one of the many reasons it’s critically important to have strong protections for voting rights. The more participation by the electorate, the broader representation in leadership. Greater representation means more perspectives are considered when crafting policy, strategy, and building institutions. The more flavors of folks considered in building societal institutions and infrastructure, the better chances they work for greater portions of the population. And that’s the point of democracy. The useless left-ish politicians need to stop pretending they can just keep doing what they have been doing, and the rest of us need to stop pretending their posturing is doing any good at all. A better lesson to learn from Jan 6th would have been that we need to solve some real problems with how this country functions. The supposed progressives cannot wait for the approval of rural America before they start making those people's lives better. Solve some real problems and the disenfranchised MAGA people will eventually come around. One way to definitely not do that is to alienate even more working class folks. Blocking a railroad labor strike was the opposite of helping people. And the opposite of upholding democratic ideals. It was shameful. Made even worse by the pretending that travesty of legislation was doing us all a favor. All it did was further demonstrate the Democratic party is entirely out of touch with the plight of ordinary Americans. The only winners there were the capitalists. Just like always. That’s the same kind of mental gymnastics conservatives use to justify “protecting the unborn from abortion” and then immediately abandoning those children the moment they breathe air. Also the same as paying millions of dollars today for art made by dead artists who couldn’t make a living from their art while they were alive. And just as back-as-wards as appointing the CEO of the largest oil company in United Arab Emirates as President of next year’s global environmental symposium, COP28. We need to learn better lessons. I remember the same kind of mistake when President Obama attempted to tackle the health care crisis in the US. I assumed it was a lost cause when the first thing they did was invite all the health insurance companies to the table to participate in building the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The point of health care is to care for the health of human beings. The point of insurance companies is to produce profit. Those are opposing goals in our current economic system. There is no way to take care of people if the institutions profiting from our un-wellness are setting up the method and mechanisms by which we all access care. It’s quite classically the fox guarding the henhouse. But not enough people made a fuss at the time, so instead of some universal health care structure we got the ACA. Which didn’t actually solve the problem of the cost of health care. All it did was provide some government subsidies for some people to buy the overprices plans from the private insurance companies. The biggest opposition to the whole mess at the time was the wall of Republicans determined to prevent President Obama from accomplishing anything at all, no matter how much it might benefit their own constituency. This week I heard an interview with an Italian artisan umbrella-maker. They said “To live long, you need to make long-range plans.” There’s a great deal of value in that. It often feels to me like we're taking collective actions today without considering the needs, challenges, and resources of tomorrow. When things go awry, we need to start with better take-aways. It's less important who is to blame than what we're all going to do differently going forward. If we can manage that, maybe history won't just keep repeating itself interminably. Information and Inspiration
The first week of a new calendar year is a nice time to reflect on the prior year and consider what I want to put-in and get-out of 2023. Thinking back on it, 2022 was nonstop full-volume in a variety of ways. It seems like a lot of people had a similar experience. For starters there was all the madness of the world, unrelenting since Covid's initial arrival almost 3 years ago. Trump supporters stormed the US capital, Covid variants lingered, the war in Ukraine persisted, extreme weather returned each season, and inflation grew. On top of the universal chaos came the backlog of things postponed during lockdown, like the four weddings I attended and all the new babies I met (who are now toddlers). The current surging under it all was a constant feeling that the world is completely different now and it’s difficult to identify exactly how to fit into it. I just couldn't wrap my head around how to engage in this new place that looks very much like the old place but does, in fact, function in a completely different manner. I spent a lot of 2022 trying to figure out how to rearrange my life and restructure my work to fit this new landscape. I tried some things; I got stuck. I tried some different things; I got stuck differently. I realized I needed some guidance, so I flew half way around the world to spend 10 days at a workshop learning how to un-stick myself. I made some headway and returned home with wind once again in my sails, only to be thrown off-kilter by yet another personal tragedy. So it goes. A great deal of what happens in life is fleeting. The ups, the downs, the churn of regularity. Even the aspects that persist occur differently as circumstances shift and change. Even long-lasting things that feel like fixtures during their time are washed-out when examined in the fullness of time. That’s one reason it's good to reminisce. It gives us perspective on how we got here and why it feels the way it does to be here now. I was looking through old photos the other day, searching for something specific to show someone. I greatly enjoyed the journey, which included a very strong vibe of oh yeeeeeaah, that totally happened. I forgot! It was a nice reminder of all the mundane details I captured because they felt beautiful, interesting, or significant at the time. It felt grounding. That was me living all those life moments. And even after all the twists and turns of 2022, I’m still here. Information and Inspiration
... “It’s a common psychosis!” At least according to Dr. Greta Pinder-Schloss, the absurd character within a character in the classic (and utterly delightful) 1991 movie The Addams Family. The false doctor explains to Gomez he is suffering an affliction called Displacement. Before his brother, Fester, disappeared decades earlier, Gomez betrayed him in matters of the heart. Now someone claiming to be Fester has returned and Gomez feels guilty about the manner of their parting. Dr. Pinder-Schloss explains to Gomez he has displaced the guilty feelings and identified his discomfort as mistrust for Fester instead. In the movie, one unacknowledged source of uncomfortable feeling is overlooked in favor of an alternate (and ultimately inaccurate) explanation. If the displacement was allowed to persist unexamined, the mis-explained feelings could not resolve. In that case, actions based on the inaccurate explanation would likely cause misunderstanding, hurt, and prolong suffering for everyone involved. A great volume of fiction exists to explore this very phenomenon, The Addams Family just happens to be one of my favorite examples. In the real world, this is also an unfortunately common occurrence. How many times have you seen someone act-out rashly in response to the reason they think someone did something before bothering to confirm their assumptions? It happens between strangers, it happens among family and friends, and it describes a lot of modern political rhetoric. Republican politicians have become quite well-known for accusing political rivals of horrific things like pedophilia while excusing actual, known acts of pedophilia perpetrated by fellow party members. This is part of the problem with conservatism: if you're in it, you can't make mistakes. So if you do err, it better a) not have happened, or b) be someone else's fault. That leads easily to an awful lot of displacement. It also means it's impossible to learn from any failure or to grow in any way. It's also very difficult to actually solve any actual problems, which could explain why they keep manufacturing new problems to solve instead of tackling the ones that already actually exist. I am personally committed to owning all my mistakes because they are part of me whether I acknowledge them or not. I would much rather be acquainted with all the parts of my self than expend the mental and emotional effort to pretend the pieces I'm not proud of don't exist. I also want to give myself the gift of being in-process. I don't have to have it all figured-out flawlessly because I'm still working on it. I'm continuously working on becoming a more whole and complete me. This practice doesn't mean I am free of all displacement tendencies, but at least I am more likely to recognize when it's happening. In fact, this week I experienced an altogether different kind of displacement. Last week my partner and I were out of town visiting family. Mid-visit, my partner came down with Covid. We came home and they isolated in our bedroom, feeling awful. I took my still-packed suitcase to the office and set up camp with the guest bed situation. I made soups and teas and cared for my sweetie from a distance. Their illness and isolation are a challenge for them for obvious reasons. The whole experience has also been a challenge for me in ways I wasn't expecting. I can't bedroom in my own bedroom. I can't bathroom in my own bathroom. I can't office in my office (as it has temporarily become my bedroom). Everyone else in the house has to reschedule their laundry since there is now a person sleeping above the (very loud) washer and dryer. We postponed our Xmas celebration a couple days, but my partner was still not fully recovered so they still had to open presents with us by video. And all the ordinary life things still need to occur, even though nothing can happen in an ordinary way. I have been feeling displaced in my own home, and without my usual life anchors for support through the stress. That feeling seems to be going around. A lot of the people I talked to this week are experiencing upheaval. Some physical, unable to be in places they usually occupy. Some mental, unable to find solitary space in a house abnormally full of holiday visitors. Some emotional, unable to avoid reminders of prior painful moments amidst all the holiday traditions. It's a time ripe for displacement. As of 2022 has been full of chaos, unknowns, and upheaval. As it comes to a close, please remember to take care of yourself. If you can resolve whatever displacement you may be experiencing by yourself or with support, please do. Give yourself the gift of starting the year running away from yourself a little less. Embrace wherever you are mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, professionally, and geographically. That's the first step. Then you can review it all and decide if and how you want to make adjustments for 2023 and future. Information and Inspiration
I have many hobbies, activities, and practices I enjoy, but I don’t do all of them all year round. In the summer I like camping. I’m not excited about camping when it’s too wet or too cold, so that’s off my radar during early spring, late fall, and all of winter. I love sewing and baking, but they are inherently indoor activities so I get excited about them in fall and winter and pay them no mind during spring and summer when the outdoors is most inviting. This week I took a martial arts class in a style new to me called White Crane Silat. The instructor offered a reminder to embrace the natural rhythm of what I’m seasonally drawn to and rest-in to those urges. It’s winter time right now and I feel drawn to slower, cozier activities. I don’t want to work at a break-neck pace, cramming in everything I can before the sudden economic marker of year-end. I’d rather wind-down gently and ooze across the date line into next year. We don't all have the option to control the pace of our work, and we often cannot control the pace of our life, so it feels important to take advantage of whatever moments I am able to direct. The last few years I have closed my office for the final two weeks of the year. This began partly to ensure clients got their year-end questions to me long before December 31st, partly to ensure I could accomplish the necessary year-end tasks for my business, and partly to take time off for the holidays. This year I found myself wishing I had the whole month to hibernate. Taking any time off as a self-employed person is not easy. It involves an obscene amount of planning and preparation. And even with all the out-of-office notifications and staff working on projects while I'm away, I still have to touch-in periodically if I'm gone more than a couple days. If I don't, I will return to an unscalable mountain of email and too many to-do's. And yet, it's still worth going through all the hassle of leaving and coming back to enjoy some time away. I wish it was as possible to put the world on pause sometimes. We get close with societally synchronized holidays. When the majority of other people are also paying more attention to family and festivities than business, it lessens the occupational FOMO and makes checking-out of work a little less inconvenient for people like me. It's also a relic of a time when human society was more aligned with natural rhythms because we had to be. A time before we had widely available technology to overcome seasonal fluctuations of temperature, light, and food availability. Today we can turn on the heat (or the AC) and drive ourselves to the grocery store where we can buy almost any fruit or veg or grain, no matter the season. Before we could adapt the world to our whims, we had to adapt ourselves to the seasonal flow of the world in order to survive it. This year I am appreciating the holiday season as a reminder of a deeper connection between humans and nature. If we can see past the sparkle and dazzle of capitalist holiday tradition, it would probably do us all some good to embrace a little more of the natural season than many of us generally do. Information and Inspiration
I spend a lot of intentional time in the practice of being present. Through martial arts, in my relationships, and by staying abreast of current events in the news. I do this because I'm pretty keen on reality. I want to know what's really happening. Not what version filters through the lens of my traumas and insecurities, or what I assume is happening, or what someone else wants me to think is happening, but what actually is. I want to know and understand my internal landscape as well as my local communities and the broader world beyond. Getting in touch with what's happening internally keeps me sane and feeling grounded. We are all offered near-non-stop messaging everywhere we go in modern society, and some of those messages are unhealthy or harmful. Some of those messages come from companies that want us to buy their products and services. Some of those messages are the expression of other people's trauma. No matter their form or origin, the messages themselves are so ubiquitous we don't even notice when some cling to us as we go about the business of our daily lives. Taking some time to peer underneath all the layers of Extra is one way I get to know the me-ist me. As I identify what has attached itself to me I can examine it, acknowledge how it served me, and decided whether I need to keep that particular piece anymore. Then I can shed the unhelpful layers I picked up along the way and in their place I can grow new practices that promote my health, peace, and wellbeing in healthy and sustainable ways. Keeping up with the world and looking under all its layers enables me to see how we got to where we are now and identify my role in perpetuating or changing aspects of it. I can't work against racism and misogyny if I don't know where it comes from or how it manifests. And that's very important work. It's critical for each of us to understand where those toxins seep through the cracks of our daily lives and lovingly plug the holes and fill the gaps to counteract the poison. Another important practice is checking-out from time to time. This is something I frequently forget and struggle the most to make time for. Modern life is busy busy and full full. It's healing to go slow slow and rejuvenating to visit empty empty. It’s also nice to vacation from reality by visiting a fantasy world, like reading a good book or watching a good movie. It's important to have a balance, of course. Spending more time in Fantasy Land than you spend engaging in your real life might be a sign that something in your reality needs to shift. Escaping from the real world to avoid processing unpleasant emotions or experiences is only ever a short-term strategy. No matter how long you delay, you will have to deal with whatever life throws at you eventually. And running from those things usually doesn't make them easier to sift through later. Sometimes allowing time and space gives you the chance to grow the skills or the spirit you need to confront the darkest of the demons that dwell in your dungeon. Other times it only serves to let it grow and fester into a tangled briar patch of pain and hurt. Ultimately, no matter how much time you spend in an alternate reality or what your reasons are for escaping, you'll probably make it just fine as long as you can still tell the difference between when you're engaging reality and when you're indulging in fantasy. There are some companies that would like to profit from blurring those lines. A tech company called Pulse9 created virtual avatars using AI technology to form an 11-member K-pop called Eternity. And we've probably all heard of the "Metaverse" by now. I don't want to be fully immersed in my entertainment or social media. I'd like to be transported through my imagination, but I still want to feel the earth beneath my feet while I'm standing. Even some of the fantasy places I like to visit can be too much like reality sometimes. I had to take a break after watching the first couple episodes of The Expanse. The future depicted in that series is a very plausible future reality for humanity, complete with all the inequality, inequity, and bigotry present in our current systems and institutions. I enjoyed both the TV series and the book series immensely, but it didn't count as an escape. The same was true when I tried to watch The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. It takes place in a more or less contemporary timeframe, but there are witches and magic layered on top. Unfortunately the story also includes some horrific misogyny in the halls of witchy power. There’s plenty of gross patriarchy bullshit in the real world, I don't need it in my fantasy as well. Sometimes I just want a story where femm humans exist and they have autonomy and agency that isn't under constant threat from the patriarchy or whatever other shitty problematic thing that assaults me every day in the real world. This week I wanted to escape to the Land of Holiday Spirit. Sunday night I was already over the idea of work before the week even started. All I wanted to do was spend this week sewing, crafting, baking, watching Xmas movies, wrapping presents, and listening to Xmas audiobooks and Xmas music. I had deadlines so I worked anyway, but I didn't want to. I am fortunate enough to be able to take the next couple weeks away from work so I can swim in whatever waters my imagination creates. Then I can check back in to the real world a little more rested. Information and Inspiration
When I was in the 7th grade we read a short story wherein a man attempts to evade authorities for reasons I no longer remember. I do remember the man visits a barber shop to aid him in altering his appearance. The barber lathers up the man's face and begins shaving, just as the authorities enter the shop. Questions are asked and answered and by some lucky chance the fugitive's identity remains undiscovered. After the authorities are gone and the shave is complete, the barber asks "Was the shave close enough for you?" to which the fugitive replies "Yes, it was a very close shave." Reading that story was how I learned a close shave is another way to describe a narrow escape. Like most people, I've had my fair share of close calls in my life. Some were brought on by my own choices, like the time I was too tired to drive but my companion was drunk so I did it anyway. I nodded off and came-to just in time to not drive off the road down a steep, tree-lined ravine. The resulting near-death adrenalin rush kept me wide awake for the rest of the ride home. Other times the circumstances that accumulate into a near miss are firmly outside our control. Like this week's run-off election in Georgia that decided control of the US Senate. I definitely don't live in that jurisdiction, so all I could do was support from the sidelines with my fingers crossed. As soon as the results were in, a significant section of my soul unclenched. It is now much less likely Congress will pass super scary legislation. It's not a whole lot more likely we'll see terrific and helpful legislation, but it definitely feels like we narrowly avoided something much, much worse. Avoiding potential calamity can be a highly effective serving of perspective from the universe. Or it can barely register amidst the everything we have to do in our pursuit of survival in a challenging world. I hope we all take this election as the lucky break it was and get down to the business of getting our collective shit together once we've had a good night sleep. “Let’s dance because we deserve it,” Senator-elect Raphael Warnock said the evening of his victory, “But tomorrow we go back into the valley to do the work.” Good advice. When you almost lose someone you love, or when you miss death by an inch yourself, it's a palpable reminder that longevity is not guaranteed. We're all essentially living on borrowed time and we should at least try to make the most of it. In a sense, the same is true for this political moment in the US. We're on borrowed political time. I think it's fair to say we have been since the 2020 election. But somehow enough of us forgot what a near miss that was we almost let it slip in this midterm election. We can't do that. We have too many real, big, important problems to solve. Like poverty and climate change. White supremacy and the threat of global nuclear war. Those things are not fixing themselves, and they only get worse if ignored or neglected. Even if you don’t want to classify the lack of red wave as a close call, the fact remains: we have only achieved the opportunity to do the work. A short six years after women were finally allowed to vote, Alice Dunbar-Nelson offered this same clarity of position in a piece called “The Negro Woman and the Ballot" published in The Messenger:
Of course we know it didn't work like that. Winning the right to participate in the electoral and political system doesn't in itself solve any of the problems plaguing citizens. That was true in 1927 and it's true today. We have to use our newly won power and position to make things happen. It's not enough to have the opportunity to fight another day, we have to do the fighting. As Lewis & Clark law professor Michele Okoh so poignantly stated in a presentation on implicit bias this week “laws don’t enforce themselves.” When I narrowly avoid catastrophe, I take a moment to appreciate what didn't come to pass. Even when the stakes are relatively low, like almost locking my keys in the car or almost forgetting my print-at-home tickets to the theater. However monumental or mundane, each near miss is impactful because it's a chance to try again but do it differently. It's not every day we get a do-over in life. We should not waste any second chances. And our elected officials shouldn't either. Your move, Congress. Information and Inspiration
I love leftovers. I have quite a full schedule most days, so a home cooked meal that’s already prepared is a lifesaver. This week I've been dining on mostly Harvest Feast leftovers, which is an especially decadent kind of leftovers. These are are extra special leftovers because the meal they came from was extra special. I am nourished in my body by the delicious food and nourished in my soul by the very recent memory of gathering with humans I love. Experiencing abundance also puts me in mind of people who don't have enough. There are free food cupboards all over my neighborhood and local mutual aide groups coordinate regularly to bring hot meals to folks living outside all around the city. So some humans are taking care of some other humans as best as we can within our current societal structure. But that doesn't change the fact that while I sit in my nice warm home eating fifth and sixth helpings of a meal from several days ago, those folks are probably having a different experience. Politicians and community activists put forth many ideas for how to address and eliminate the effects of poverty, including not having an indoor place to live and store possessions. At best, those initiatives and policies only address the symptoms. At worst, those initiatives and policies blame the victims for their own circumstances and make the struggle worse. Poverty causes a great many problems in society and the root cause of poverty is the extremely unequal access to resources in this country. When I was a kid, a lot of my clothing and school supplies were hand-me-downs. I am the oldest child in my nuclear family, so I wasn't receiving a wardrobe from my older siblings. We were just poor. So I had clothes and shoes and backpacks and books from families that had access to more resources than my family. My over-worked-single-mom somehow managed to avoid framing these leftovers as shameful. It was more like getting presents from helpful and generous strangers. I remember only one time when a class-mate made a snide remark about my pre-owned attire. At the time I was just confused. I registered (correctly) that guy was just being a jerk. But I was lucky. We lived in a nice neighborhood, I went to a school with a lot of wealthy kids, and my mom worked in an office for a lot of wealthy professionals. So the hand-me-downs we got were no well-worn discards, they were like-new leftovers. We should all be so lucky. Wouldn't it be nice if we on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder could all have ample and shame-free access to the leavings from the lap of luxury? No. No it would not. That only sounds like kindness in the context of our current capitalist societal systems. Instead, I'd like a different system. The have-nots shouldn't be subsisting on left-overs from the ultra-wealthy. People born into poverty shouldn't have to pick up the scraps people born into wealthy decided to throw away. Everyone should have their base needs met first. Once that is paid for, people can decided what luxurious things they want to buy with their personal extra. People who can afford to fund scientific efforts to extend their lives can afford to feed and house and educate the rest of our people. As Anand Giridharadas so eloquently said earlier this week "It is a policy choice to allow some people to accumulate that much money (hundreds of billions of dollars in the case of people in the United States) before everybody has the chance to live with dignity." As constituents, a lot of us are inactively choosing the way things are right now. By doing nothing differently, we choose the status quo. The status quo where people with the most money make decisions the rest of us have to live with and die from. Anand Giridharadas reminds us this week that we can actively choose something different. There is plenty of precedent, even in our own national history. I would like to make the choice to redistribute excess wealth. I would like us all to make that choice. Information and Inspiration
I enjoy cooking all the food for this week’s holiday. I love roasting a turkey, boiling and mashing potatoes, steaming veggies, making cranberry sauce, and baking pies. I even like the two-day process of preparing stuffing following my gramma's recipe. I don't enjoy calling it Thanksgiving. The holiday attached to that title is built on a mountain of lies and celebrates colonialism and genocide. Not inspiration for gratitude to me. Since I realized what I was taught about thanksgiving in school was a lie, I've been trying different ways to morph my default November feasting into anti-colonialist mode. I have listened to land acknowledgments before dinner. Included traditional dishes with local ingredients in the menu. Spent the month of November consuming content about native history and googled what local tribes are up to in modern times. The last few years I experimented with calling it Harvest. The timing is seasonally appropriate, with all the leaves turning pretty fall colors, pumpkin spices flying around and getting on everything, and all the other autumnal vibes. But Harvest still felt like a misnomer because most of what ends up on the table comes from the grocery store. I wasn’t cooking bounty harvested from my garden; I was preparing dishes I don’t cook often because they take a long time to put together. It’s nice to have a nationally sanctioned excuse to spend what would otherwise be a workday gathering with friends and family to eat foods we don’t cook every day. So this year I decided to call it what it is: Feast. And I decided to use it as an excuse to talk about the detriments of colonialism still present in modern life. I also learned about two other alternate names for this long-standing holiday: Truthsgiving and Takesgiving. What I really appreciate about these alternate titles is they include acknowledgment of the roots of Thanksgiving as well as the impact of that history on all of us today. They also offer an opportunity to examine how we celebrate and consider whether we would like to do that differently. For example: many people feel obligated to spend the day with relatives, whether they would like to gather with those people or not. If the whole tradition is made up anyway (and based on lies), that's all the permission you need to scrap the problematic parts and craft something more meaningful and fulfilling. My favorite way to feast is with the group of friends who have gradually become my holiday family. I also like to invite all the strays and orphans to join us. Any coworker or friend or neighbor who is new in town or can't travel home to be with their people is welcome at our table. I spend three days cooking and baking and I enjoy pouring the time and care into food craft that I am too busy working to do on a regular week. We eat delicious food, we play games, we share stories and laughter, and commiserate over how much capitalism sucks. It's utterly delightful. I want the November holiday to be a feast of truth and knowledge as much as a feast of food. I want to contribute to decolonizing my own worldview and as much of the world around me as I can. Fortunately we live in an age where information and historical accounts are extremely accessible. Unfortunately we also live in an age where misinformation is prevalent and powerful interests actively attempt to erase certain kinds of history. I am extremely grateful for all the Black, indigenous, queer and other historians of color who continue to tell the stories ignored by the whitewashed textbooks I read in school. Thanks to their efforts a more complete accounting of our past is available to peruse. All we have to do is look for it. Information and Inspiration
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AuthorJaydra is a human in-process, working to make the world a better place. Sharing thoughts, feelings, and observations about the human experience. Archives
November 2023
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