Regular readers may recall my GGGpa Joe Donavan, the pony express rider. He had 8 children, 5 boys and 3 girls. One of the oldest boys was Uncle Paul.
Paul J Donavan was born in 1879 in Colorado. By the time he was in his 70s, he was living in a converted bus by himself down in Los Angeles. His wife, Henrietta Hartsel (Sam Hartsel's youngest - Sam and Grandpa Joe were good friends), had died in the early 1950s. Their 3 children had grown. And down to LA moved my dad and his family. My Granddad Wally was Paul's nephew, and always insisted on picking up the bill when they went out to dinner. Paul let him. It wasn't until he died that Granddad found out Paul was actually rich as hell. It always confused Dad why Paul lived in a bus, but this was generally chalked up to the Donavan family's flare for being weird. The real reason is a lot more interesting.
Uncle Paul wrote a book called "Shacks Under the River Bank". I'm trying to figure out exactly when it was written, but Dad says it was several decades before its publishing in 1955. Because no story any Donavan ever told has been short, the book is almost 900 pages long. Granddad Wally had a copy, but somehow the book (though not its dust jacket) was lost sometime in the 60s.
My Grandma Elsbeth, Granddad Wally's widow, moved into assisted living last year. At 86, she still has perfect hearing, but she had macular degeneration and can't see well. She herself is interesting as hell, but hers is a whole different story. At any rate, Grandma Elsbeth gave me all the family genealogy information the family had kept/collected through the years. Among the information was the dust jacket for Uncle Paul's book. My Dad had never read it. Grandma couldn't remember exactly what it was about, but she said it was interesting. Thanks to the internet, I found a copy at a rare/antique bookstore in Brooklyn, and had it shipped to me in California.
Holy. Shit.
Interesting is one way of putting it. Given total scope of its content, finding this book at this moment in U.S. political and economic history, it makes me feel like Uncle Paul was a psychic.
I opened the book, and began by reading its dedication:
"This writing is dedicated to any one of the millions of honest people who live on the shrinking margin of existence, in the midst of the greatest abundance man has known, struggling through their lives against an unseen and un-suspected foe - and, at the end, not one owns the roof over his head nor the bed he dies on."
Holy. Shit.
It was like Uncle Paul reached through the decades, grabbed me by the bones, and shook me. I had to read this book.
I went back to read the book's dust jacket, and another paper slipped out. At first I thought it was a copy of the dust jacket, but it turned out to be the publisher's announcement of the book. I'm still figuring the whole thing out. Knowing exactly when Uncle Paul wrote the book would be helpful. Ultimately, it seems as though this book takes place in a distopian future (now likely past) in which there was no organized labor and the coining of currency/monetary policy had been privatized.
The protagonist resolves, after foreclosure by the Friendly Loan Company on her small home, to expose the swindle that the privatization of public resources has created for everyone. She stumbles upon a group of tramps. People she thought were tramps, in any case. Upon further discussion, it turns out that these men are members of the Local Chapter of the Socratic Society of America. The Society's mission was to find a way to restore control of currency and monetary policy to the Congress. (To be fair, I don't think even Uncle Paul could have envisioned the failures of our current Congress, so he was going on the assumption that the Legislature still worked...)
The amazing part are the Society's members. As it turns out, the "tramps" living down in shacks under the river bank are for the most part very successful businessmen - lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors, as well as miners, farmers and the rest. "Many had incomes from various sources and had chosen that way of life, to be, as they said, closer to God and to men and away from the turmoil and hypocrisy."
Holy. Shit.
There are a number of ways that this speaks to me - on personal, professional, and political levels, and I'm still processing exactly why this all has resounded with me quite so deeply.
First, and maybe most obvious to some, is Uncle Paul's choice to live in a bus. "Off the grid" as it were. People thought Uncle Paul was crazy and poor and a hobo and whatever. But I think he may just have been ahead of his time. At worst, which is still amazing, he lived out his vision.
Second, and even more obvious to me, is my undeniable need to set up a local chapter of this Society. Which may mean going off the grid, but in the sort of way a woman who likes shoes would do it.
Did I mention that Uncle Paul came up with the idea of selling naming rights to stars, and once sued the mayor of Chicago for air pollution because he was putting too much hot air into the atmosphere?...
More to come, but... Holy. Shit.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Fantasy Football Saved My Life
OK... Ultimately, my friends and family and even colleagues at work saved my life, but fantasy football was the tipping point - Fantasy Football was the thing that eased me back into society in a very safe and controlled way, which was about the only way I was going to be able to do it.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
It started out innocently enough. My bestie was going to a conference where he could bring spouses, and - not having a spouse - asked me to go lie on a beach and get spa treatments with a bunch of executives' wives while he hobnobbed. In. I requested a week off of work.
Simultaneously, a good friend was spending a year traveling the world. He's a great guy and a dear friend. When he left the country, I told him to look out - if I found myself with any time off, I might fly somewhere fun and meet him for a week's vacation.
So, when my trip with my bestie fell through due to some sort of glitch, I shot my traveler buddy an email. Not wanting to waste the vacation time I'd taken (nor the passport I'd renewed), I asked him where he'd be the week I had vacation and whether he'd like some company. Hell yeah - let's meet in Argentina. Sweet.
We had a wonderful time. We drank awesome wine. We ate AWESOME food. We met some really nice people. We got robbed. We took the bus over the Andes to Chile, looking down at each hairpin turn (all 50-something of them) as the bus slowly crawls down the mountain. It doesn't look real.
To backtrack slightly, yes. We got robbed. We were robbed on our last day in Mendoza, right in their central park in broad daylight (seriously - 4pm on a Tuesday during their Summer). We were wandering some less-populated paths, which I suppose we shouldn't have, but at no time did the situation feel unsafe - until it felt totally and completely unsafe. The shift happened in about 10 seconds. I'm still not totally clear on the details - my friend and I have chatted them through a couple times, and there are a few things we can't agree on. We do agree that there was a gun and it was real bad. At least in my instance, PTSD kicked in fairly soon thereafter, which was a whole lot worse.
When I got back to the States, I couldn't stop smiling - thanking people for anything, everything they may have done for me. My brain had frozen in "please help me, please like me so you'll help me" mode - which I'd been forced into for the prior 2 days as I struggled to make my way back home through 3 countries, 4 airports, 2 customs offices... without my glasses, which were in my stolen purse. I'd run out of contacts the day before. I did manage to keep my passport, because I never walk around with it during foreign travel. (I'd always thought it was a fairly silly precaution, but have always done it anyway - even though I don't go to places where there is rampant crime... Hahaha.) Apparently, this behavior (smiling and pleading and being generally spastic) is not unusual when something like this happens, but when my Mom tells someone - anyone - that they need a martini to calm down, there's something weird going on.
My parents got me at the airport, and proceeded to tell me they'd been worried sick. I'd barely been able to talk to them since the robbery; no phone, spotty internet, infrequent facebook updates I wasn't sure went through because apparently you can't make collect calls anymore - at least not from the airport in Santiago. They told me I was an idiot. I sat there and took it, but inside I was really, really resentful that my parents were making it about their worry. But I just pushed through with a plaster grin on my face... Please, thank you. Oh parents, thanks for the food, and martini (very needed), and glasses, and phone, and money, and I have nothing but what you're giving me, and I'm 32... Jesus, this is humiliating.
I tried to go into work the next day. I made it as far as lunch before trying to barricade myself into my office, and was finally forced to tearfully creep into my boss' office to ask if I could go home. The next day I had to call my mom - who was starting chemo that day BTW - and ask if she could send Dad to get me. She did. I was shivering when he picked me up and put me in his truck - I finally had to make him pull over on the freeway so I could throw up.
When we got to the hospital, Mom had started her treatment and only one of us could go in. Dad sent me in. I was having what was later called a "psychiatric emergency". The nurses had to tend to me more than my cancer-patient mom. They got me warming packs, blankets, tea, and crackers, while my poor mother was starting chemo, which must have been scary enough without her daughter falling to pieces in front of her.
Humiliating. I wanted to be there, to be strong for my mom - and I literally couldn't handle my emotions - or at least my physical responses to emotions. On some level, I really hated myself for not handling it better. I new I was supposed to handle it better, but I couldn't the handle uncontrollable fear of some blind threat from completely and illogically terrifying me.
I am unusually logical - or so I've been told. When I suddenly couldn't explain my emotions on any sort of founding, it only made things worse - I mean, I'd survived - I was only robbed - I didn't get kidnapped or worse - I made it home... Why was I so terrified? Why was I so impacted that I had to go out for a month on disability, and then only came back part-time for several months before venturing fully back into my working life. I still have problems with work, but it's mostly OK. In any event, I was sidelined for months. It was difficult to get through each minute. I would look down at my watch and not understand how the eternity of worry and sadness and fear I'd just experienced had occurred in what the clock said was only 2 minutes. Things are much better now, even though it still impacts me daily.
All that said, the first step toward reestablishing contact with the outside world (aside from my yoga class, which I'd scamper in and out of hoping no one would talk to or notice me)... The first toe I figuratively stuck out the door was fantasy football.
That was my first attempt at reintegration. My first attempt to pay attention - real attention - to anything outside of my own miserable little experience - even if it was just how much Hakeem Nick's production as a WR screwed the first half of my season last year... And it did. That man killed me like Mark Ingram at RB the year before.
Suddenly, I had something to look forward to every week - almost every day. Games Thursday, Sunday, and Monday. Waiver wire on Wednesday. Did I get my players? Have I found a Nicks' replacement yet? Did the commish really block my trade! Outrage!!! I'm going to message my buddy and see if his trade went through. The commish will hear of this! (Poor commish - he let someone else take the league over this year - I think my PTSD-driven fanaticism was too much for him.)
Oh, Fantasy Football - you were my savior. In a world where seconds and minutes felt like eternities and one week ran into the next, I suddenly only had a few more hours until something happened. Something interesting. Something that would take up more time. Something that would help me get through my life. It was an unbelievable blessing. I'm really not sure if I would have gotten through last fall without my league.
But more than that...
I love the game. I love high school, college, and pro. I love the tailgate I get to help some college buddies put on. I love underdogs in general and the California Golden Bears in particular. I love all the many, many, many memories I have of family gathering around in the bleachers or on the couch to watch a game. I love hearing my grandmother yell "Whoa, the flee-flicker!" during a play she's correctly identified. I LOVE that my great grandpa was one of the first 100 people to buy season tickets to the Broncos, and that my family in Denver still has the tickets. I love that when I am at my most horribly, terribly, irrationally worried, I can get lost in strategy for my fantasy football lineup.
I. Freaking. Love. Football.
So... As a woman, this love of football has been a little problematic for me of late. As a feminist, it's become nearly intolerable.
I used to hate the idea of that - "Feminist". I didn't want to be angry - no one likes an angry person. And I used to think that all feminists were angry. But what I've realized is that - even if everyone outside the feminist community thinks the opposite - it's not anger. It's a resentment that lurks inside of you about the very way you are - actually, less that than an resentment about how society treats you for being who you are. To a certain level, it starts to ingrain itself into a part of who you are. I avoided it as long as I could, but once you see how crappy things are for women, you can't unsee it. And then as you experience that crappiness, you always wonder whether this is discrimination or whether you actually contributed to the situation... I didn't ask for this... Or did I? Crap. I might have. I don't want to be unreasonable and ignore my part in the situation. Where's the line? Where's the line?
The NFL and the Ravens tried to argue that this SHOULD be Mrs. Rice's thinking - I know in far less severe situations it has been mine. "I'm partially responsible - I hit him first (haaaaaa) - I feel terrible too - I'm being impacted by his suspension monetarily and otherwise." Or at least that's what the NFL thought was a sufficient defense at the time.
So Mrs. Rice, all of these horrible things are happening to you and your husband and everyone's judging your most personal moment and you are just laid bare. How's that going for you?...
--- I'm guessing not good.
This is why having a partial domestic-violence policy is problematic. It needs to be OK, or it needs to be not OK. (And by that I mean it needs to totally be NOT OK.) Anything in between screws the victim - media coverage continues and the court of public opinion is drawn out. Each time that video is aired, Mrs. Rice is having to relive this. It's wrong.
Had there been some level of certainty (like zero-tolerance) around penalties for domestic violence, Mrs. Rice could have been spared this... Swift justice might have been nice...
And (NFL, I'm looking at you) if you're trying to figure out where to draw the line - how to define the rule - I have a suggestion:
Why not just go to the other extreme?
If there's even an ALLEGATION of domestic abuse, the guy is indefinitely suspended without pay. Players, coaches, trainers, refs.... Doesn't matter. If there turns out to be a rampant over-reporting problem and players become victimized by wrongful accusers, we can cross that bridge at that point. If you get accused, or the police think there's a reasonable chance you're abusing your spouse, it's over. You stay home. You get no pay. Contract suspended - if you're exonerated, you can get your back-pay.
That seems pretty easy. You get no carrot for this one thing, dude. There's only stick if you do this. But we promise we'll give you the carrot back if we shouldn't have given you the stick. And we promise both sides we'll fairly investigate everything, and we'll do it quickly. You cool with that?
Players should THANK the NFL for protecting their wives/girlfriends/daughters/sisters/moms like that. If you love your (wife/girlfriend/daughter/sister/mom), and if you thought there might be someone else beating her - not you, but maybe her coworker - you want the boss stepping in like that. Just sayin'.
If you don't love the women in your life, examine that. If you do, what's the harm in making zero-tolerance the rule?
See what I did there?...
By NOT having a zero-tolerance rule, we're making it much harder for victims to understand that they shouldn't have to put up with someone hitting them. When you see movies with story-lines where love conquers all, or you've been fed a biblical version of a woman's role in marriage, or whatever... when there's no societal norm to contradict that - no norm to say "nope, you're right; that's NOT OK"... what else are you supposed to think? You think you're supposed to stick your screwed up situation out.
It would be SO easy for the NFL to impact the lives of its many, many female fans in a positive manner. So easy. But apparently we're talking about dollars and cents here. Are there more ladies and dudes that support them than there are idiot dickhead fans? Do the former outspend the latter? Do they speak louder? Those are really the only questions left in my mind. Apparently other questions - though argued over - don't matter...
Not whether Ray Rice should have been suspended sooner. Not whether Roger Goodell should have acted quicker. Not whether Goodell should have investigated better or told the media the truth about having video footage of the incident. He should have. He should have. He should have. He should have...
How many more 'he should haves' do women have to put up with before someone steps up and does what's right? At this point, even if Goodell did - and I'm not convinced he even knows what "right" is in this situation - would fixing the issues mean anything if Goodell stays on as league commissioner?
I'm thinking no.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
It started out innocently enough. My bestie was going to a conference where he could bring spouses, and - not having a spouse - asked me to go lie on a beach and get spa treatments with a bunch of executives' wives while he hobnobbed. In. I requested a week off of work.
Simultaneously, a good friend was spending a year traveling the world. He's a great guy and a dear friend. When he left the country, I told him to look out - if I found myself with any time off, I might fly somewhere fun and meet him for a week's vacation.
So, when my trip with my bestie fell through due to some sort of glitch, I shot my traveler buddy an email. Not wanting to waste the vacation time I'd taken (nor the passport I'd renewed), I asked him where he'd be the week I had vacation and whether he'd like some company. Hell yeah - let's meet in Argentina. Sweet.
We had a wonderful time. We drank awesome wine. We ate AWESOME food. We met some really nice people. We got robbed. We took the bus over the Andes to Chile, looking down at each hairpin turn (all 50-something of them) as the bus slowly crawls down the mountain. It doesn't look real.
To backtrack slightly, yes. We got robbed. We were robbed on our last day in Mendoza, right in their central park in broad daylight (seriously - 4pm on a Tuesday during their Summer). We were wandering some less-populated paths, which I suppose we shouldn't have, but at no time did the situation feel unsafe - until it felt totally and completely unsafe. The shift happened in about 10 seconds. I'm still not totally clear on the details - my friend and I have chatted them through a couple times, and there are a few things we can't agree on. We do agree that there was a gun and it was real bad. At least in my instance, PTSD kicked in fairly soon thereafter, which was a whole lot worse.
When I got back to the States, I couldn't stop smiling - thanking people for anything, everything they may have done for me. My brain had frozen in "please help me, please like me so you'll help me" mode - which I'd been forced into for the prior 2 days as I struggled to make my way back home through 3 countries, 4 airports, 2 customs offices... without my glasses, which were in my stolen purse. I'd run out of contacts the day before. I did manage to keep my passport, because I never walk around with it during foreign travel. (I'd always thought it was a fairly silly precaution, but have always done it anyway - even though I don't go to places where there is rampant crime... Hahaha.) Apparently, this behavior (smiling and pleading and being generally spastic) is not unusual when something like this happens, but when my Mom tells someone - anyone - that they need a martini to calm down, there's something weird going on.
My parents got me at the airport, and proceeded to tell me they'd been worried sick. I'd barely been able to talk to them since the robbery; no phone, spotty internet, infrequent facebook updates I wasn't sure went through because apparently you can't make collect calls anymore - at least not from the airport in Santiago. They told me I was an idiot. I sat there and took it, but inside I was really, really resentful that my parents were making it about their worry. But I just pushed through with a plaster grin on my face... Please, thank you. Oh parents, thanks for the food, and martini (very needed), and glasses, and phone, and money, and I have nothing but what you're giving me, and I'm 32... Jesus, this is humiliating.
I tried to go into work the next day. I made it as far as lunch before trying to barricade myself into my office, and was finally forced to tearfully creep into my boss' office to ask if I could go home. The next day I had to call my mom - who was starting chemo that day BTW - and ask if she could send Dad to get me. She did. I was shivering when he picked me up and put me in his truck - I finally had to make him pull over on the freeway so I could throw up.
When we got to the hospital, Mom had started her treatment and only one of us could go in. Dad sent me in. I was having what was later called a "psychiatric emergency". The nurses had to tend to me more than my cancer-patient mom. They got me warming packs, blankets, tea, and crackers, while my poor mother was starting chemo, which must have been scary enough without her daughter falling to pieces in front of her.
Humiliating. I wanted to be there, to be strong for my mom - and I literally couldn't handle my emotions - or at least my physical responses to emotions. On some level, I really hated myself for not handling it better. I new I was supposed to handle it better, but I couldn't the handle uncontrollable fear of some blind threat from completely and illogically terrifying me.
I am unusually logical - or so I've been told. When I suddenly couldn't explain my emotions on any sort of founding, it only made things worse - I mean, I'd survived - I was only robbed - I didn't get kidnapped or worse - I made it home... Why was I so terrified? Why was I so impacted that I had to go out for a month on disability, and then only came back part-time for several months before venturing fully back into my working life. I still have problems with work, but it's mostly OK. In any event, I was sidelined for months. It was difficult to get through each minute. I would look down at my watch and not understand how the eternity of worry and sadness and fear I'd just experienced had occurred in what the clock said was only 2 minutes. Things are much better now, even though it still impacts me daily.
All that said, the first step toward reestablishing contact with the outside world (aside from my yoga class, which I'd scamper in and out of hoping no one would talk to or notice me)... The first toe I figuratively stuck out the door was fantasy football.
That was my first attempt at reintegration. My first attempt to pay attention - real attention - to anything outside of my own miserable little experience - even if it was just how much Hakeem Nick's production as a WR screwed the first half of my season last year... And it did. That man killed me like Mark Ingram at RB the year before.
Suddenly, I had something to look forward to every week - almost every day. Games Thursday, Sunday, and Monday. Waiver wire on Wednesday. Did I get my players? Have I found a Nicks' replacement yet? Did the commish really block my trade! Outrage!!! I'm going to message my buddy and see if his trade went through. The commish will hear of this! (Poor commish - he let someone else take the league over this year - I think my PTSD-driven fanaticism was too much for him.)
Oh, Fantasy Football - you were my savior. In a world where seconds and minutes felt like eternities and one week ran into the next, I suddenly only had a few more hours until something happened. Something interesting. Something that would take up more time. Something that would help me get through my life. It was an unbelievable blessing. I'm really not sure if I would have gotten through last fall without my league.
But more than that...
I love the game. I love high school, college, and pro. I love the tailgate I get to help some college buddies put on. I love underdogs in general and the California Golden Bears in particular. I love all the many, many, many memories I have of family gathering around in the bleachers or on the couch to watch a game. I love hearing my grandmother yell "Whoa, the flee-flicker!" during a play she's correctly identified. I LOVE that my great grandpa was one of the first 100 people to buy season tickets to the Broncos, and that my family in Denver still has the tickets. I love that when I am at my most horribly, terribly, irrationally worried, I can get lost in strategy for my fantasy football lineup.
I. Freaking. Love. Football.
So... As a woman, this love of football has been a little problematic for me of late. As a feminist, it's become nearly intolerable.
I used to hate the idea of that - "Feminist". I didn't want to be angry - no one likes an angry person. And I used to think that all feminists were angry. But what I've realized is that - even if everyone outside the feminist community thinks the opposite - it's not anger. It's a resentment that lurks inside of you about the very way you are - actually, less that than an resentment about how society treats you for being who you are. To a certain level, it starts to ingrain itself into a part of who you are. I avoided it as long as I could, but once you see how crappy things are for women, you can't unsee it. And then as you experience that crappiness, you always wonder whether this is discrimination or whether you actually contributed to the situation... I didn't ask for this... Or did I? Crap. I might have. I don't want to be unreasonable and ignore my part in the situation. Where's the line? Where's the line?
The NFL and the Ravens tried to argue that this SHOULD be Mrs. Rice's thinking - I know in far less severe situations it has been mine. "I'm partially responsible - I hit him first (haaaaaa) - I feel terrible too - I'm being impacted by his suspension monetarily and otherwise." Or at least that's what the NFL thought was a sufficient defense at the time.
So Mrs. Rice, all of these horrible things are happening to you and your husband and everyone's judging your most personal moment and you are just laid bare. How's that going for you?...
--- I'm guessing not good.
This is why having a partial domestic-violence policy is problematic. It needs to be OK, or it needs to be not OK. (And by that I mean it needs to totally be NOT OK.) Anything in between screws the victim - media coverage continues and the court of public opinion is drawn out. Each time that video is aired, Mrs. Rice is having to relive this. It's wrong.
Had there been some level of certainty (like zero-tolerance) around penalties for domestic violence, Mrs. Rice could have been spared this... Swift justice might have been nice...
And (NFL, I'm looking at you) if you're trying to figure out where to draw the line - how to define the rule - I have a suggestion:
Why not just go to the other extreme?
If there's even an ALLEGATION of domestic abuse, the guy is indefinitely suspended without pay. Players, coaches, trainers, refs.... Doesn't matter. If there turns out to be a rampant over-reporting problem and players become victimized by wrongful accusers, we can cross that bridge at that point. If you get accused, or the police think there's a reasonable chance you're abusing your spouse, it's over. You stay home. You get no pay. Contract suspended - if you're exonerated, you can get your back-pay.
That seems pretty easy. You get no carrot for this one thing, dude. There's only stick if you do this. But we promise we'll give you the carrot back if we shouldn't have given you the stick. And we promise both sides we'll fairly investigate everything, and we'll do it quickly. You cool with that?
Players should THANK the NFL for protecting their wives/girlfriends/daughters/sisters/moms like that. If you love your (wife/girlfriend/daughter/sister/mom), and if you thought there might be someone else beating her - not you, but maybe her coworker - you want the boss stepping in like that. Just sayin'.
If you don't love the women in your life, examine that. If you do, what's the harm in making zero-tolerance the rule?
See what I did there?...
By NOT having a zero-tolerance rule, we're making it much harder for victims to understand that they shouldn't have to put up with someone hitting them. When you see movies with story-lines where love conquers all, or you've been fed a biblical version of a woman's role in marriage, or whatever... when there's no societal norm to contradict that - no norm to say "nope, you're right; that's NOT OK"... what else are you supposed to think? You think you're supposed to stick your screwed up situation out.
It would be SO easy for the NFL to impact the lives of its many, many female fans in a positive manner. So easy. But apparently we're talking about dollars and cents here. Are there more ladies and dudes that support them than there are idiot dickhead fans? Do the former outspend the latter? Do they speak louder? Those are really the only questions left in my mind. Apparently other questions - though argued over - don't matter...
Not whether Ray Rice should have been suspended sooner. Not whether Roger Goodell should have acted quicker. Not whether Goodell should have investigated better or told the media the truth about having video footage of the incident. He should have. He should have. He should have. He should have...
How many more 'he should haves' do women have to put up with before someone steps up and does what's right? At this point, even if Goodell did - and I'm not convinced he even knows what "right" is in this situation - would fixing the issues mean anything if Goodell stays on as league commissioner?
I'm thinking no.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
In Defense of Sofia...
Oh Lord, I'm actually going to attempt this. Heaven help me. Amen.
When I saw the coverage of Sofia Vergara at the Emmy's last night, I almost wet my pants laughing so hard. Jesus. That woman is an evil genius.
To all the haters: I have a number of arguments for why it is both acceptable and understandable that Sofia Vergara made the decision to stand on a spinning platform while boring stuff was going on during the Emmy's. But the first and most important is this - it's her body and she can do whatever the hell she wants to with it. Is it necessarily responsible for her to contribute to the public discourse in this way? Maybe, maybe not. But her actions have people talking about issues I'd like them to be considering, and for that reason alone, I applaud her.
My secondary argument for why it's acceptable is this - the media was probably going to cut to her and comment on her gown and her hair and god knows what else while boring speeches were being given. By standing on a spinning platform and allowing people to ogle her, she acknowledged the sort of press that made such an event the next logical conclusion in the public discourse. She took control of her own narrative. Can you call that naive? I guess so, but I actually call it the resulting action of a conclusion drawn by a relatively self-aware person. I also call it funny as hell.
She has a right to do this, bitches. Why would you automatically assume that she was an unwitting victim of the media's exploitation? Isn't the pretty, dumb lady-victim narrative getting a little old?
Let me take a step back. My Grandma Elsbeth was and is a beautiful lady. And because she was so beautiful in her youth, people always seemed to make a big deal of it.
Something weird happens to you when people look at you all the time. You're never not self-conscious. And you never know why people want you to be in a room with them. I don't know if I'm as pretty as Grandma Elsbeth was at my age, and I'm certainly no Sofia Vergara, but I do know what it's like to have people tell you how pretty you are with a moderate degree of frequency.
It's not something you complain about. It feels weird to complain about it. It's a privilege, I suppose, but unlike the kind of privilege that the dude sitting next to me in that tech start-up meeting the other week had - the kind that carries with it the benefit of presumed intelligence - being pretty doesn't usually get a person the kind of attention that most people want.
Grandma Elsbeth is a beautiful person, inside and out. She is the kindest, sweetest, most creative person I have ever known. The woman is incapable of negative feelings, whether or not that's healthy. When you're pretty, you get a lot of "be a good little girl" and "pretty is as pretty does" to go along with your "what a beautiful little thing!"... Thing - yes, thing. For various reasons, I don't get defensive when someone refers to me as a PYT (thanks a freaking lot for coining THAT one, MJ), but I certainly don't encourage anyone to use the term.
In any event, when you're pretty, you get attention for being pretty. It doesn't matter that Grandma Elsbeth is brilliant. It doesn't matter that she was an amazing musician. Most people don't know she's the best cook that ever existed, or that she kept an itemized list of pantry contents in the cupboards, so that she could always send someone with a ready-made grocery list to the store while she continued cooking. Outside of the family, most people didn't know she kept updated astrological charts on the wall in the hallway for each family member, or that she let her grandkids pick out patterns for Halloween costumes that she would make by hand each year. But everyone knew Grandma Elsbeth was pretty.
Being pretty definitely opens some doors - you'd be lying to say it doesn't. Grandma Elsbeth was the house bassist for the biggest jazz club in Denver when she was 17 years old. She was damn good, but I don't believe for a second that at least part of what got her the gig was the fact that she was a pretty little white girl. Similarly, I got invited to an inordinate number of meetings and happy hours for my relative seniority when I started in my industry. I'd love to think that it was simply for the pleasure of my company - I am relatively hilarious at cocktail parties - but I'd be lying to myself if I didn't acknowledge that at least a few of those invitations were because of the way that I look rather than my intellectual contribution to the discourse.
When I exhibit actual understanding of complex topics, I get one of two responses: surprise or confusion. I think right now the media and all the haters are responding to Sofia Vergara acknowledging the way the media views her with the latter - confusion.
She can't possibly know what she's doing! It's not P.C.!
F-you guys. That's her experience. She's giving the media what it wants, and NOW you're criticizing someone for it? How about criticizing the media for putting her on display in the first place?
What is your response to that going to be? She asks for it? Look at the way she dresses! Of COURSE the media puts her on display!
Let me explain something to you - Sofia Vergara simultaneously won and lost the genetic lottery. She is conventionally beautiful, and now people criticize her for walking around on the planet in a conventionally beautiful body. What in the name of hell and creation is that??
Sofia Vergara went into a career where she would be put on display in the media - and yes, that's a choice. It is her choice and her right to go into whatever career she chooses that will cover her bills. Haters gotta hate - she's conventionally beautiful and gets all the benefits and drawbacks that come with it. Benefit: you get paid a lot. Detriment: even if you're smart as hell, you still only get cast as a bimbo. You could choose not to participate in careers that reinforce those stereotypes, but guess what happens if you do that? You end up unemployed. Don't hate the player - hate the game.
Every field has these issues. You can't find a job where gender-disparity isn't apparent, at least not in any field I've investigated. In the course of my job, I've investigated a lot.
But let's go further down that slippery slope. I work in insurance - finance-related, but my customer segment focus is technology. At one point, I ran a region for my company. Generally people would encourage my presence at parties with absolutely no idea my role. I was assumed to be the trainee that was tagging along. The reaction to my title/job role was always fairly similar.
"YOU are in charge of that? That's a REALLY big role."
Well, fuck you very much too - is what I wanted to say, but instead I said this: "Yup. It's so weird when there's a brain in one of their pretty little heads."
I think it translated. The man I'm thinking about in this instance seemed very uncomfortable around me after that. Good - your comment made me uncomfortable; now you can be too.
Sofia Vergara - YOU made the decision to just stand on a rotating platform and let people ogle you in the same way they likely would if you simply sat in your seat and did nothing? That's an awfully BIG decision - you must not understand what it means.
It appears that it's OK for people to give you attention for being pretty until they realize that you know they're doing it.
...
When I was in college, I went to a New Year's Eve party. I got trashed. Trashity-trash-trash-trashed.
It was my right to do that if I wanted to. It wasn't a good idea, but it was my right. I was at a party and knew 39 out of the 40 people there. Not only that, the 39 people that were there were really, really, really good friends of mine. Nice people. Awesome people. People that I still can't friend on Facebook because I can't bring myself to talk some of them still. Because the ONE dude I didn't know... The ONE - he was the ONE person that decided after I had passed out in bed that it would be totally reasonable to crawl in with me when no one was looking.
He didn't go to Berkeley. He was a friend of a friend's from high school - I think from Monterey. I don't remember everything that happened. There was a lot of me rolling onto my stomach to try to keep him from groping my private bits. There was a lot of me flailing my arms to try to push him off of me. I was half dressed when I woke. I don't remember much else, but the details I do remember, I'll spare you. It was unpleasant, to understate things significantly.
There was no recourse. There was no forensic evidence - at least none that could prove anything. I felt like I was living outside my own body for the majority of that semester, and I don't think I really got back into it until fairly recently. It became my new normal. My body wasn't my own - other people could do what they wanted with it, even if I didn't want them to. It was easier to feel like I didn't inhabit it.
Fortunately, this became a somewhat merciful defense mechanism as I moved into a career in a very, very, very male dominated industry. I kind of pride myself that I've never slept with a coworker or colleague, though I'm sure many assume I have. How else would I have gotten this position?
That presumption is certainly part of the long list of bullshit I've had to put up with.
Let's take a quick look at the atrocities committed against just me:
1 - On 3 separate occasions, unknown men in various hotels have figured out which hotel room I was staying in and made attempts to contact me by leaving anonymous notes, asking the reception desk to call up to my room or other. In 2 of those instances, I was forced to move to other rooms during my stay to stop the people from continuing. In each instance, the hotel was very accommodating and understood why it would make me feel unsafe, but in none of those circumstances was the man who tried to contact me asked to leave the hotel as a guest.
2 - When standing on tip-toe and leaning over to reach a menu on the bar during a work happy hour, a coworker felt it completely acceptable to yell "Look, she's presenting!" (like a doe in heat) to my other male coworkers. I immediately turned around and backhanded him. It was an automatic reflex. I was called in to HR the next day.
3 - Four male senior executives at various business partners of my company's attempted to shove their respective tongues down my throat at/during/on a happy hour/conference/colleague's birthday party/work trip.
I could keep going. I don't want to. I don't really want to talk about the dude that tried to get into my pants at that NYE party all those years ago either, but it seems to me now that I don't have much choice. I have to assume that there are other college co-eds that are going through exactly what I did, and they need to know that they're justified in feeling whatever they're feeling. They need to know they aren't alone. This sort of bullshit happens to 20% of women walking around in this country - 1 in 5, people.
When I bring up these things - these actions men have taken because of some sort of presumed ownership of my body - a feeling of implied acceptance of their advancements that I don't believe they'd feel toward most people, apparently based upon my mere presence in the room... A lot of people tell me I'm being a bad sport. I didn't get raped, so what am I complaining about?
Wait a second... Did you hear what I just said?
In college, there was literally no recourse for me. I wasn't "technically raped", and there was little forensic evidence to tie him to me. Additionally, I had been drunk. Additionally, he and I had been seen speaking to each other and he had bought me a drink. Additionally, he didn't go to Cal. Additionally, I didn't know his last name (it would have been really easy to find out, but it seemed impossible at the time). Additionally - and here's the kicker - even when I told friends about some of what had happened, most of them acted like it was no big deal - so I just started telling myself that I was overreacting. I was overreacting by seeing him all over campus when I knew he wasn't there... getting so scared I couldn't leave my room for several days... gaining 20 pounds - starting to get tattoos and piercings to feel like I had control over my body... canceling classes and begging administration to let me go to pass/no pass grading so my GPA wasn't impacted too greatly... It took a freaking inquest to get that last one done - additionally, when I explained why I was having these problems, no one offered resources or suggested that I attempt to press charges. (And this was at U.C. freakin' Berkeley - bastion of liberal, feminist, hippy shit. How are women treated on other campuses across the country?) But in the end they grudgingly allowed me to change my Econ course to P/NP... Anyway, it felt like it was all just an overreaction on my part, and it all made me feel guilty.
I stopped complaining about how and why it impacted me. I stopped complaining that it ever even happened, unless forced. Occasionally when getting into new relationships, it became necessary to explain what had happened to my boyfriends. For years, I couldn't even say it out loud - I felt too guilty about complaining when other people had been assaulted so much worse than I had. I felt too guilty about being impacted by something no one seemed to think was a big deal when I told them. In defense of those boyfriends, they none of them minimized it.
It took me YEARS to get to a point where I could tell people anything about it. I still hate NYE and very few friends know why. The first friend I disclosed details to a few years ago later accused me of pretending like it was a big deal to me in order to... to I don't know what. This person and I are no longer friends largely because she never allowed me to discuss the matter with her once she decided that I'd lied. She also blamed her reluctance to continue our friendship on the fact that I'd gone on anti-depressants. In email. I guess it was nice of her to send an email.
Let's trace that line of reasoning back. Society reinforced in me that it was no big deal that someone presumed ownership over my body. As such, I repressed/minimized the fact that someone had assaulted me for years. Once I finally sought help and got on some anti-depressants so I could start to process what had happened to me... Once I finally started feeling brave enough to share what had happened with friends for the first time in ages... The friend I told said I was a liar and she didn't want to be friends with me anymore. She also never gave me an opportunity to explain.
She is a world-class bitch, but society and the media reinforce that her response is OK. I didn't have a single friend try to call her out on it. The media still barely reports on sexual assaults, little is being done to prevent them, and when a woman complains about a person taking liberties to which they are not entitled... SHE is the one people get mad at? Sofia Vergara stands on a pedestal and spins around for everyone to see pro-actively instead of waiting for it to happen on E!, and SHE'S the one people critique? She didn't ask for that body, just like I didn't ask for all those guys to figure out which hotel room I was in so they could stalk me. But when either one of us point that out, she gets criticized and I get moved to a different room...
How on earth does that make any sense at all?
We're accommodating the status quo, rather than pointing out what's wrong with it. When someone highlights what's wrong in our society, they should be applauded, whether the method they choose is black humor or blog. Laugh and the world laughs with you... unless you're trying to laugh at the stupid ways people treat you, in which case shut up and pretend like it isn't happening. Heaven forbid we make media trolls or businessmen uncomfortable.
So go for it, Sofia. Own that body, and make it work for you, sister! You're making people uncomfortable, which is probably a good place to start.
(Important footnote: I have a great number of male and female colleagues who have been exceptionally supportive and wonderful to me throughout my career. Similarly, I had several college friends who didn't minimize my experience and basically got me through college, whether or not they knew they were doing it. I want to make sure that their good work and kindness isn't ignored by this piece. Gentlemen, ladies, friends - you know who you are.)
When I saw the coverage of Sofia Vergara at the Emmy's last night, I almost wet my pants laughing so hard. Jesus. That woman is an evil genius.
To all the haters: I have a number of arguments for why it is both acceptable and understandable that Sofia Vergara made the decision to stand on a spinning platform while boring stuff was going on during the Emmy's. But the first and most important is this - it's her body and she can do whatever the hell she wants to with it. Is it necessarily responsible for her to contribute to the public discourse in this way? Maybe, maybe not. But her actions have people talking about issues I'd like them to be considering, and for that reason alone, I applaud her.
My secondary argument for why it's acceptable is this - the media was probably going to cut to her and comment on her gown and her hair and god knows what else while boring speeches were being given. By standing on a spinning platform and allowing people to ogle her, she acknowledged the sort of press that made such an event the next logical conclusion in the public discourse. She took control of her own narrative. Can you call that naive? I guess so, but I actually call it the resulting action of a conclusion drawn by a relatively self-aware person. I also call it funny as hell.
She has a right to do this, bitches. Why would you automatically assume that she was an unwitting victim of the media's exploitation? Isn't the pretty, dumb lady-victim narrative getting a little old?
Let me take a step back. My Grandma Elsbeth was and is a beautiful lady. And because she was so beautiful in her youth, people always seemed to make a big deal of it.
Something weird happens to you when people look at you all the time. You're never not self-conscious. And you never know why people want you to be in a room with them. I don't know if I'm as pretty as Grandma Elsbeth was at my age, and I'm certainly no Sofia Vergara, but I do know what it's like to have people tell you how pretty you are with a moderate degree of frequency.
It's not something you complain about. It feels weird to complain about it. It's a privilege, I suppose, but unlike the kind of privilege that the dude sitting next to me in that tech start-up meeting the other week had - the kind that carries with it the benefit of presumed intelligence - being pretty doesn't usually get a person the kind of attention that most people want.
Grandma Elsbeth is a beautiful person, inside and out. She is the kindest, sweetest, most creative person I have ever known. The woman is incapable of negative feelings, whether or not that's healthy. When you're pretty, you get a lot of "be a good little girl" and "pretty is as pretty does" to go along with your "what a beautiful little thing!"... Thing - yes, thing. For various reasons, I don't get defensive when someone refers to me as a PYT (thanks a freaking lot for coining THAT one, MJ), but I certainly don't encourage anyone to use the term.
In any event, when you're pretty, you get attention for being pretty. It doesn't matter that Grandma Elsbeth is brilliant. It doesn't matter that she was an amazing musician. Most people don't know she's the best cook that ever existed, or that she kept an itemized list of pantry contents in the cupboards, so that she could always send someone with a ready-made grocery list to the store while she continued cooking. Outside of the family, most people didn't know she kept updated astrological charts on the wall in the hallway for each family member, or that she let her grandkids pick out patterns for Halloween costumes that she would make by hand each year. But everyone knew Grandma Elsbeth was pretty.
Being pretty definitely opens some doors - you'd be lying to say it doesn't. Grandma Elsbeth was the house bassist for the biggest jazz club in Denver when she was 17 years old. She was damn good, but I don't believe for a second that at least part of what got her the gig was the fact that she was a pretty little white girl. Similarly, I got invited to an inordinate number of meetings and happy hours for my relative seniority when I started in my industry. I'd love to think that it was simply for the pleasure of my company - I am relatively hilarious at cocktail parties - but I'd be lying to myself if I didn't acknowledge that at least a few of those invitations were because of the way that I look rather than my intellectual contribution to the discourse.
When I exhibit actual understanding of complex topics, I get one of two responses: surprise or confusion. I think right now the media and all the haters are responding to Sofia Vergara acknowledging the way the media views her with the latter - confusion.
She can't possibly know what she's doing! It's not P.C.!
F-you guys. That's her experience. She's giving the media what it wants, and NOW you're criticizing someone for it? How about criticizing the media for putting her on display in the first place?
What is your response to that going to be? She asks for it? Look at the way she dresses! Of COURSE the media puts her on display!
Let me explain something to you - Sofia Vergara simultaneously won and lost the genetic lottery. She is conventionally beautiful, and now people criticize her for walking around on the planet in a conventionally beautiful body. What in the name of hell and creation is that??
Sofia Vergara went into a career where she would be put on display in the media - and yes, that's a choice. It is her choice and her right to go into whatever career she chooses that will cover her bills. Haters gotta hate - she's conventionally beautiful and gets all the benefits and drawbacks that come with it. Benefit: you get paid a lot. Detriment: even if you're smart as hell, you still only get cast as a bimbo. You could choose not to participate in careers that reinforce those stereotypes, but guess what happens if you do that? You end up unemployed. Don't hate the player - hate the game.
Every field has these issues. You can't find a job where gender-disparity isn't apparent, at least not in any field I've investigated. In the course of my job, I've investigated a lot.
But let's go further down that slippery slope. I work in insurance - finance-related, but my customer segment focus is technology. At one point, I ran a region for my company. Generally people would encourage my presence at parties with absolutely no idea my role. I was assumed to be the trainee that was tagging along. The reaction to my title/job role was always fairly similar.
"YOU are in charge of that? That's a REALLY big role."
Well, fuck you very much too - is what I wanted to say, but instead I said this: "Yup. It's so weird when there's a brain in one of their pretty little heads."
I think it translated. The man I'm thinking about in this instance seemed very uncomfortable around me after that. Good - your comment made me uncomfortable; now you can be too.
Sofia Vergara - YOU made the decision to just stand on a rotating platform and let people ogle you in the same way they likely would if you simply sat in your seat and did nothing? That's an awfully BIG decision - you must not understand what it means.
It appears that it's OK for people to give you attention for being pretty until they realize that you know they're doing it.
...
When I was in college, I went to a New Year's Eve party. I got trashed. Trashity-trash-trash-trashed.
It was my right to do that if I wanted to. It wasn't a good idea, but it was my right. I was at a party and knew 39 out of the 40 people there. Not only that, the 39 people that were there were really, really, really good friends of mine. Nice people. Awesome people. People that I still can't friend on Facebook because I can't bring myself to talk some of them still. Because the ONE dude I didn't know... The ONE - he was the ONE person that decided after I had passed out in bed that it would be totally reasonable to crawl in with me when no one was looking.
He didn't go to Berkeley. He was a friend of a friend's from high school - I think from Monterey. I don't remember everything that happened. There was a lot of me rolling onto my stomach to try to keep him from groping my private bits. There was a lot of me flailing my arms to try to push him off of me. I was half dressed when I woke. I don't remember much else, but the details I do remember, I'll spare you. It was unpleasant, to understate things significantly.
There was no recourse. There was no forensic evidence - at least none that could prove anything. I felt like I was living outside my own body for the majority of that semester, and I don't think I really got back into it until fairly recently. It became my new normal. My body wasn't my own - other people could do what they wanted with it, even if I didn't want them to. It was easier to feel like I didn't inhabit it.
Fortunately, this became a somewhat merciful defense mechanism as I moved into a career in a very, very, very male dominated industry. I kind of pride myself that I've never slept with a coworker or colleague, though I'm sure many assume I have. How else would I have gotten this position?
That presumption is certainly part of the long list of bullshit I've had to put up with.
Let's take a quick look at the atrocities committed against just me:
1 - On 3 separate occasions, unknown men in various hotels have figured out which hotel room I was staying in and made attempts to contact me by leaving anonymous notes, asking the reception desk to call up to my room or other. In 2 of those instances, I was forced to move to other rooms during my stay to stop the people from continuing. In each instance, the hotel was very accommodating and understood why it would make me feel unsafe, but in none of those circumstances was the man who tried to contact me asked to leave the hotel as a guest.
2 - When standing on tip-toe and leaning over to reach a menu on the bar during a work happy hour, a coworker felt it completely acceptable to yell "Look, she's presenting!" (like a doe in heat) to my other male coworkers. I immediately turned around and backhanded him. It was an automatic reflex. I was called in to HR the next day.
3 - Four male senior executives at various business partners of my company's attempted to shove their respective tongues down my throat at/during/on a happy hour/conference/colleague's birthday party/work trip.
I could keep going. I don't want to. I don't really want to talk about the dude that tried to get into my pants at that NYE party all those years ago either, but it seems to me now that I don't have much choice. I have to assume that there are other college co-eds that are going through exactly what I did, and they need to know that they're justified in feeling whatever they're feeling. They need to know they aren't alone. This sort of bullshit happens to 20% of women walking around in this country - 1 in 5, people.
When I bring up these things - these actions men have taken because of some sort of presumed ownership of my body - a feeling of implied acceptance of their advancements that I don't believe they'd feel toward most people, apparently based upon my mere presence in the room... A lot of people tell me I'm being a bad sport. I didn't get raped, so what am I complaining about?
Wait a second... Did you hear what I just said?
In college, there was literally no recourse for me. I wasn't "technically raped", and there was little forensic evidence to tie him to me. Additionally, I had been drunk. Additionally, he and I had been seen speaking to each other and he had bought me a drink. Additionally, he didn't go to Cal. Additionally, I didn't know his last name (it would have been really easy to find out, but it seemed impossible at the time). Additionally - and here's the kicker - even when I told friends about some of what had happened, most of them acted like it was no big deal - so I just started telling myself that I was overreacting. I was overreacting by seeing him all over campus when I knew he wasn't there... getting so scared I couldn't leave my room for several days... gaining 20 pounds - starting to get tattoos and piercings to feel like I had control over my body... canceling classes and begging administration to let me go to pass/no pass grading so my GPA wasn't impacted too greatly... It took a freaking inquest to get that last one done - additionally, when I explained why I was having these problems, no one offered resources or suggested that I attempt to press charges. (And this was at U.C. freakin' Berkeley - bastion of liberal, feminist, hippy shit. How are women treated on other campuses across the country?) But in the end they grudgingly allowed me to change my Econ course to P/NP... Anyway, it felt like it was all just an overreaction on my part, and it all made me feel guilty.
I stopped complaining about how and why it impacted me. I stopped complaining that it ever even happened, unless forced. Occasionally when getting into new relationships, it became necessary to explain what had happened to my boyfriends. For years, I couldn't even say it out loud - I felt too guilty about complaining when other people had been assaulted so much worse than I had. I felt too guilty about being impacted by something no one seemed to think was a big deal when I told them. In defense of those boyfriends, they none of them minimized it.
It took me YEARS to get to a point where I could tell people anything about it. I still hate NYE and very few friends know why. The first friend I disclosed details to a few years ago later accused me of pretending like it was a big deal to me in order to... to I don't know what. This person and I are no longer friends largely because she never allowed me to discuss the matter with her once she decided that I'd lied. She also blamed her reluctance to continue our friendship on the fact that I'd gone on anti-depressants. In email. I guess it was nice of her to send an email.
Let's trace that line of reasoning back. Society reinforced in me that it was no big deal that someone presumed ownership over my body. As such, I repressed/minimized the fact that someone had assaulted me for years. Once I finally sought help and got on some anti-depressants so I could start to process what had happened to me... Once I finally started feeling brave enough to share what had happened with friends for the first time in ages... The friend I told said I was a liar and she didn't want to be friends with me anymore. She also never gave me an opportunity to explain.
She is a world-class bitch, but society and the media reinforce that her response is OK. I didn't have a single friend try to call her out on it. The media still barely reports on sexual assaults, little is being done to prevent them, and when a woman complains about a person taking liberties to which they are not entitled... SHE is the one people get mad at? Sofia Vergara stands on a pedestal and spins around for everyone to see pro-actively instead of waiting for it to happen on E!, and SHE'S the one people critique? She didn't ask for that body, just like I didn't ask for all those guys to figure out which hotel room I was in so they could stalk me. But when either one of us point that out, she gets criticized and I get moved to a different room...
How on earth does that make any sense at all?
We're accommodating the status quo, rather than pointing out what's wrong with it. When someone highlights what's wrong in our society, they should be applauded, whether the method they choose is black humor or blog. Laugh and the world laughs with you... unless you're trying to laugh at the stupid ways people treat you, in which case shut up and pretend like it isn't happening. Heaven forbid we make media trolls or businessmen uncomfortable.
So go for it, Sofia. Own that body, and make it work for you, sister! You're making people uncomfortable, which is probably a good place to start.
(Important footnote: I have a great number of male and female colleagues who have been exceptionally supportive and wonderful to me throughout my career. Similarly, I had several college friends who didn't minimize my experience and basically got me through college, whether or not they knew they were doing it. I want to make sure that their good work and kindness isn't ignored by this piece. Gentlemen, ladies, friends - you know who you are.)
Friday, August 22, 2014
Old Bill and The Funny Papers
My Grandpa Elmer was one of the absolute best people I've ever known. He was also hands-down the funniest. I still have a difficult time talking about him. He gave most of the things that have brought me joy in life - my love of music, my singing voice, my sense of humor, my smile... less excitingly my eyebrows and chin... and interestingly an extra ridge in my ear no one else in the family got. He also gave me his father's songs - at least the clean ones - from Vaudeville.
So, yeah... Grandpa was a pretty interesting guy. He rode on the rails, hobo-style, during the depression - went town to town looking for work until Roosevelt opened up the CCC Camps. Grandpa Elmer went to work as a mess cook in the camps, which helped build the national park system throughout the country. After that, he and his family moved in a trailer from Oklahoma to California. The Grapes of Wrath is like the family bible (except that half of that side of the family are born-again, so I'm probably committing blasphemy right now). He was a miner in Livermore when he met my Grandma June at an orange stand shaped like an orange in Castro Valley. Love at first sight. Grandma June made him quit mining in the middle of the Great Depression and find another if he wanted to date her - she couldn't go with a miner; it was too dangerous. So Grandpa Elmer quit and married her 3 months later.
As cool as the dude was, it was his service in the military during WWII that made me think of him today.
Grandpa drew a... well, I wouldn't call it a good or a bad card in terms of military assignments during the war. He was assigned to cook on an ocean-going tug boat for the Navy. His two younger brothers also enlisted in the Navy, and all three of them were assigned to different ships in the Pacific. (This was not an accident - their father, Elmer I, an army infantryman in WWI, marched the soles off his boots crossing Europe. He made sure his boys signed up for the navy - marching was for the birds.) Miraculously, all three boys made it home.
Grandpa was never going to be on the front-lines. His tug boat was assigned to retrieve disabled vehicles after major battles throughout the South Pacific. This meant that his ship showed up to pull boats and bodies out of the water after Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, etc.
I don't know about you, but I don't think you could pay me to do that.
Additionally, even if his ship somehow got caught in the crossfire, he wasn't one of the guys that was going to man the guns. Now, Grandpa Elmer's brother Emory got his boat blown out from under him 3 times during the war, but he made it out. Either way, Grandpa's exposure to the front-lines was simultaneously direct and indirect. He saw the aftermath of the battles. He pulled the bodies out of the water. He had brothers that were fighting on the front-lines. He had a wife back home that was building the ships that were carrying his fellow sailors across the sea. He had a son in a West Coast port town he had to protect from naval threat from Japan. The fight was personal for him. It was personal for America.
You couldn't pay me to do it, but get me pissed off and scared enough, and I might volunteer.
We've been in Iraq in one form or another for pretty much all my life. I remember having friends whose fathers fought in the First Gulf War when I was in elementary school. I remember the dawning of CNN's 24-hour news cycle, with night vision-tinted bombs streaking across the screen. I remember getting the letter from one of my best friends from high school saying that he was going over to Afghanistan. I remember the protests on Berkeley's campuses when we went into Afghanistan, and I remember going into San Francisco for the protests when we went into Iraq. They almost had me on board for Afghanistan, but they really lost me at Iraq.
I remember having a Barbara Lee Speaks For Me bumper-sticker on my truck. I remember the old hippy who held up a sign with a tube of KY Liquid and a picture of George Bush, which read "Fuck Bush - Use No Lubricants". Another man held one with a picture of Donald Rumsfeld with a large piece of duct tape over his mouth, which read "DUCT TAPE SAVES LIVES".
I had several friends in Afghanistan, and a few of the same in Iraq. One of my best friends from high school and I wrote each other through his first and second deployments, so I got to read the way his tone changed over time. He believed in it when it was about making sure 9/11 never happened again. As it became less about that, it became more difficult for him to tell me about how he felt - or anyway, he did it less often. That friend still isn't the same - he never will be... Though as an upside he's one of the few friends that can empathize with my PTSD symptoms.
So when I saw that a journalist had been beheaded AGAIN in the Middle East, anger doesn't really begin to describe what I felt. It is personal.
I am what you could call a dove, and it strikes me as fitting that my Grandpa Elmer's people were Quaker and Dutch. This means that they always spoke out about war and slavery (the people invented the phrase "Speak Truth to Power"), and understood what it meant to be a persecuted religious minority. The family came to New Amsterdam around 1620 - a few generations later, other members of his family would come with William Penn to Pennsylvania.
My dove status notwithstanding, I will happily write a very large check to help pay for the bombs that eradicate that journalist's murderers off the face of the planet. It is personal.
Grandpa Elmer taught me a lot of songs. His father had been a performer in a minstrel show in Vaudeville in the years before he met Grandpa Elmer's mother. Yes... My great-grandfather was a comic in blackface. I'm not going to defend it.
That said, I learned a lot of songs as a result. Grandpa Elmer's father had a beautiful voice, which Gramps and I inherited. When I was a baby, Grandpa would walk over to my house everyday and sing to me while Mom took a shower and ran errands. I don't even remember learning the songs - I just always knew them.
One of them went something like this:
High in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
Lived two mountain billy goats
Old Bill had eaten some fresh dynamite
Thinking it was Quaker Oats
Before too long as I expected
The bills got in a fight
Well one did not know Old Bill was loaded
Til he hit that dynamite
High through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
Old Bill sailed up through the forest pines
His front legs came down in New York Town
The Carolinas got the whiskers of Bill
His hind-legs, they are missing still
They found his horns in the Mountains of Virginia
And his tail up in a lonesome pine.
I don't really care how we get rid of these ISIL characters, but in my mind they just got into a fight with Old Bill. Don't ram the billy goat that's full of dynamite, you unbelievable pricks, or expect to be blown across hell and creation. And today the President authorized more airstrikes.
And the Congress has to vote to continue military operations. It's a Constitutional imperative if military operations are to continue more than 60 days. And as much as I would have loved it if, as Cheney had predicted when we went to war with Iraq more than 10 years ago, the war had only lasted a few weeks... I don't think anyone is that optimistic this time around.
And Congress is going to have to vote on something. Holy Hell. They're going to vote on something?...
I certainly hope so. James Foley deserves a vote. His parents and friends and family deserve a vote. America deserves a vote.
It is personal. And whatever the outcome, I'm pleading - please let the legislative process work. A journalist committed to helping people in other countries just died trying to let the world know what's happening in the Middle East. That, in my mind, is the epitome of what makes America great. We encourage, or at least used to encourage, professions that exposed human catastrophe in the world and abuses of power at home and abroad. We used to encourage soldiers and journalists and peacekeepers... Maybe we still encourage it, but there are equally encouraged voices that are calling for legislative gridlock, or too readily calling to send our soldiers into harm's way, or militarize local police forces as if that will help them keep the peace in local communities - it's a daily mockery of the vision of our Founders.
I am not an advocate for war, but I'm also not for allowing people to murder our best and brightest citizens. People are being killed for the crime of being American.
Hey Congress, are you listening now?
Grandpa Elmer always picked the Funny Papers out of the newspaper and read them to me. Somehow, we got a habit of saying goodbye to each other by one saying "See you in the funny papers," and the other responding "On the monkeys' side".
The monkeys' side of the funny papers is seeming less and less entertaining to me as I age. I'm reading op eds accosting Twitter for blocking the more graphic images of Foley's beheading, as if showing some basic concern for the families of those still held by ISIL and those who've been killed isn't enough of a reason to show a little restraint. I'm seeing hosts on the news screaming about showing footage of Ferguson, MO during their discussions of Foley's killing. While I absolutely understand the frustration - Foley's death should be a topic of individual concern - his death is no more concerning to me than that of Michael Brown. Both are indicative of systemic failures in foreign and domestic policies. Both men are American. And both men's memories should be fought for.
My problem is that the funny papers are trying to treat them differently, cover them differently. Don't worry about the kid that got shot in Ferguson, we've got a REAL problem over in Iraq. A white Christian dude was killed for being American. He was BEHEADED.
OK, you're right, that is a total tragedy. It's personal for me too. I'm pissed.
But Michael Brown was kind of beheaded too, and the guy that did it was sworn to protect him and kids like him. The officer that killed him seems to have shown about as much regard for Michael's life as the ISIL terrorist had for James Foley's. Neither man's sacrifice should go unexamined, nor should either situation lack extreme consequences for the perpetrators. Both are tragedies, and news outlets should be covering both as such.
Old Bill's opponent could be ISIL in this case, but it could be militarized police forces as well... In my opinion, both are walking around with a belly full of dynamite, and both are picking a fight with the wrong people. We may not yet be able to help in the ISIL situation from home, but we can certainly work to change domestic policy at the ballot box. Whatever your opinion on a solution, find a candidate who shares your view, and vote for them. Vote. There are too many people who've sacrificed way too much for us to feel like voting is an imposition. As a country, America is only loaded with dynamite when its citizens participate.
So, yeah... Grandpa was a pretty interesting guy. He rode on the rails, hobo-style, during the depression - went town to town looking for work until Roosevelt opened up the CCC Camps. Grandpa Elmer went to work as a mess cook in the camps, which helped build the national park system throughout the country. After that, he and his family moved in a trailer from Oklahoma to California. The Grapes of Wrath is like the family bible (except that half of that side of the family are born-again, so I'm probably committing blasphemy right now). He was a miner in Livermore when he met my Grandma June at an orange stand shaped like an orange in Castro Valley. Love at first sight. Grandma June made him quit mining in the middle of the Great Depression and find another if he wanted to date her - she couldn't go with a miner; it was too dangerous. So Grandpa Elmer quit and married her 3 months later.
As cool as the dude was, it was his service in the military during WWII that made me think of him today.
Grandpa drew a... well, I wouldn't call it a good or a bad card in terms of military assignments during the war. He was assigned to cook on an ocean-going tug boat for the Navy. His two younger brothers also enlisted in the Navy, and all three of them were assigned to different ships in the Pacific. (This was not an accident - their father, Elmer I, an army infantryman in WWI, marched the soles off his boots crossing Europe. He made sure his boys signed up for the navy - marching was for the birds.) Miraculously, all three boys made it home.
Grandpa was never going to be on the front-lines. His tug boat was assigned to retrieve disabled vehicles after major battles throughout the South Pacific. This meant that his ship showed up to pull boats and bodies out of the water after Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, etc.
I don't know about you, but I don't think you could pay me to do that.
Additionally, even if his ship somehow got caught in the crossfire, he wasn't one of the guys that was going to man the guns. Now, Grandpa Elmer's brother Emory got his boat blown out from under him 3 times during the war, but he made it out. Either way, Grandpa's exposure to the front-lines was simultaneously direct and indirect. He saw the aftermath of the battles. He pulled the bodies out of the water. He had brothers that were fighting on the front-lines. He had a wife back home that was building the ships that were carrying his fellow sailors across the sea. He had a son in a West Coast port town he had to protect from naval threat from Japan. The fight was personal for him. It was personal for America.
You couldn't pay me to do it, but get me pissed off and scared enough, and I might volunteer.
We've been in Iraq in one form or another for pretty much all my life. I remember having friends whose fathers fought in the First Gulf War when I was in elementary school. I remember the dawning of CNN's 24-hour news cycle, with night vision-tinted bombs streaking across the screen. I remember getting the letter from one of my best friends from high school saying that he was going over to Afghanistan. I remember the protests on Berkeley's campuses when we went into Afghanistan, and I remember going into San Francisco for the protests when we went into Iraq. They almost had me on board for Afghanistan, but they really lost me at Iraq.
I remember having a Barbara Lee Speaks For Me bumper-sticker on my truck. I remember the old hippy who held up a sign with a tube of KY Liquid and a picture of George Bush, which read "Fuck Bush - Use No Lubricants". Another man held one with a picture of Donald Rumsfeld with a large piece of duct tape over his mouth, which read "DUCT TAPE SAVES LIVES".
I had several friends in Afghanistan, and a few of the same in Iraq. One of my best friends from high school and I wrote each other through his first and second deployments, so I got to read the way his tone changed over time. He believed in it when it was about making sure 9/11 never happened again. As it became less about that, it became more difficult for him to tell me about how he felt - or anyway, he did it less often. That friend still isn't the same - he never will be... Though as an upside he's one of the few friends that can empathize with my PTSD symptoms.
So when I saw that a journalist had been beheaded AGAIN in the Middle East, anger doesn't really begin to describe what I felt. It is personal.
I am what you could call a dove, and it strikes me as fitting that my Grandpa Elmer's people were Quaker and Dutch. This means that they always spoke out about war and slavery (the people invented the phrase "Speak Truth to Power"), and understood what it meant to be a persecuted religious minority. The family came to New Amsterdam around 1620 - a few generations later, other members of his family would come with William Penn to Pennsylvania.
My dove status notwithstanding, I will happily write a very large check to help pay for the bombs that eradicate that journalist's murderers off the face of the planet. It is personal.
Grandpa Elmer taught me a lot of songs. His father had been a performer in a minstrel show in Vaudeville in the years before he met Grandpa Elmer's mother. Yes... My great-grandfather was a comic in blackface. I'm not going to defend it.
That said, I learned a lot of songs as a result. Grandpa Elmer's father had a beautiful voice, which Gramps and I inherited. When I was a baby, Grandpa would walk over to my house everyday and sing to me while Mom took a shower and ran errands. I don't even remember learning the songs - I just always knew them.
One of them went something like this:
High in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
Lived two mountain billy goats
Old Bill had eaten some fresh dynamite
Thinking it was Quaker Oats
Before too long as I expected
The bills got in a fight
Well one did not know Old Bill was loaded
Til he hit that dynamite
High through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
Old Bill sailed up through the forest pines
His front legs came down in New York Town
The Carolinas got the whiskers of Bill
His hind-legs, they are missing still
They found his horns in the Mountains of Virginia
And his tail up in a lonesome pine.
I don't really care how we get rid of these ISIL characters, but in my mind they just got into a fight with Old Bill. Don't ram the billy goat that's full of dynamite, you unbelievable pricks, or expect to be blown across hell and creation. And today the President authorized more airstrikes.
And the Congress has to vote to continue military operations. It's a Constitutional imperative if military operations are to continue more than 60 days. And as much as I would have loved it if, as Cheney had predicted when we went to war with Iraq more than 10 years ago, the war had only lasted a few weeks... I don't think anyone is that optimistic this time around.
And Congress is going to have to vote on something. Holy Hell. They're going to vote on something?...
I certainly hope so. James Foley deserves a vote. His parents and friends and family deserve a vote. America deserves a vote.
It is personal. And whatever the outcome, I'm pleading - please let the legislative process work. A journalist committed to helping people in other countries just died trying to let the world know what's happening in the Middle East. That, in my mind, is the epitome of what makes America great. We encourage, or at least used to encourage, professions that exposed human catastrophe in the world and abuses of power at home and abroad. We used to encourage soldiers and journalists and peacekeepers... Maybe we still encourage it, but there are equally encouraged voices that are calling for legislative gridlock, or too readily calling to send our soldiers into harm's way, or militarize local police forces as if that will help them keep the peace in local communities - it's a daily mockery of the vision of our Founders.
I am not an advocate for war, but I'm also not for allowing people to murder our best and brightest citizens. People are being killed for the crime of being American.
Hey Congress, are you listening now?
Grandpa Elmer always picked the Funny Papers out of the newspaper and read them to me. Somehow, we got a habit of saying goodbye to each other by one saying "See you in the funny papers," and the other responding "On the monkeys' side".
The monkeys' side of the funny papers is seeming less and less entertaining to me as I age. I'm reading op eds accosting Twitter for blocking the more graphic images of Foley's beheading, as if showing some basic concern for the families of those still held by ISIL and those who've been killed isn't enough of a reason to show a little restraint. I'm seeing hosts on the news screaming about showing footage of Ferguson, MO during their discussions of Foley's killing. While I absolutely understand the frustration - Foley's death should be a topic of individual concern - his death is no more concerning to me than that of Michael Brown. Both are indicative of systemic failures in foreign and domestic policies. Both men are American. And both men's memories should be fought for.
My problem is that the funny papers are trying to treat them differently, cover them differently. Don't worry about the kid that got shot in Ferguson, we've got a REAL problem over in Iraq. A white Christian dude was killed for being American. He was BEHEADED.
OK, you're right, that is a total tragedy. It's personal for me too. I'm pissed.
But Michael Brown was kind of beheaded too, and the guy that did it was sworn to protect him and kids like him. The officer that killed him seems to have shown about as much regard for Michael's life as the ISIL terrorist had for James Foley's. Neither man's sacrifice should go unexamined, nor should either situation lack extreme consequences for the perpetrators. Both are tragedies, and news outlets should be covering both as such.
Old Bill's opponent could be ISIL in this case, but it could be militarized police forces as well... In my opinion, both are walking around with a belly full of dynamite, and both are picking a fight with the wrong people. We may not yet be able to help in the ISIL situation from home, but we can certainly work to change domestic policy at the ballot box. Whatever your opinion on a solution, find a candidate who shares your view, and vote for them. Vote. There are too many people who've sacrificed way too much for us to feel like voting is an imposition. As a country, America is only loaded with dynamite when its citizens participate.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
One of These Things Is Not Like the Other...
Yesterday, I went to a meeting at a fairly well-known tech start-up. They're relatively well established, and have very smart people working there. I've been analyzing technology companies and cyber security systems for over 10 years now, which is probably longer than most of their employees have been coding, but I suppose that's neither here nor there.
I asked a question of their head of internal infrastructure - "can you please describe your migration plans and timeline for moving from outsourced to owned data centers?" I realize that may sound technical to some - basically, I was asking what they were going to do about moving their computing systems from someone else's servers they pay to use to their own servers. The dude looked at me and started: "Well, currently, we use other people's servers for our data center, which is basically like the machines we plug the cables into..."
"Yeah, I know what they do."
(Looks shocked) "Oh, OK..."
This was right after they discussed something really technical without dumbing it down to a dude sitting next to me. I've known the guy for years. He doesn't work in the space often. He had no idea what they were talking about. That's no slight on him - there just aren't many people that do what I do, and fewer that have been doing it for as long as I have.
...
When I was a little girl, my Grandma June used to take great pride in telling me I was the first born daughter of a first born daughter of a first born daughter... seven generations back. While that is very special in many ways, yesterday I wasn't feeling so into it. Being a girl working in business isn't always all it was cracked up to be.
My mom burned her bra with her sister-in-law in feminist rallies when she was young. She then promptly got married and stayed home to raise me and my brother. That said, her basic belief was that her generation had fought the battle for future generations of women, and the workforce would be a fair place for me once I entered it.
I love my mom, but she was way off base.
The funny thing is, my great-great-grandmother, Edith Adora (Dansdill) Murray was a suffragette. She fought the fight so that my great-grandmother could vote the minute she came of age.
Just because one generation paves the way for a right to exist for the next... It doesn't mean that right is a given for the next generation. Grandma Edith may have paved the way for her two daughters to vote. She and her husband may have sent both of their daughters to college in an era when women just didn't do that. But just because my great-grandma had the right to go to college and had the vote doesn't mean she didn't face all kinds of discrimination at school or even the voting booth.
Similarly, my mother may have burned her bra for me to be able to "break through the glass ceiling", but I certainly haven't broken through yet, and I'm not sure it's possible. Or rather, it's possible, but only if you're willing to focus on that and nothing else, and only if you put up with a whole lot of shit. Men don't have to make the same choices to achieve the same life outcome.
My Grandma June went into the work force during WWII - she was a riveter in Richmond, CA. She was tiny, so they had her rivet in the nose of the ship, where most people couldn't fit. After the war ended, she kept on working. Grandma June is my mom's mother. She ended up working for my dad's dad (Grandpa Wally) in the assessor's office for Contra Costa County. She told me he was always very fair, but I always found it odd that all the women crunched the numbers, then Grandpa Wally checked for accuracy. It didn't seem to me like he did very much - though I realize that's oversimplifying everything significantly - Grandpa Wally was one of the smartest guys I've ever known, and always did very well in business.
Today, I go into a meeting, and whenever I ask a question that demonstrates my knowledge of the space, I get one of two reactions:
1) surprise - "holy hell - does she know what I'm talking about?"
2) confusion - "did she get lucky asking that question the right way? Is it possible she read up on the subject on her way here?"
Inevitably, either reaction ends with the person to whom I asked the question looking at the guy sitting next to me, who is almost always significantly junior to me, and directing the answer to my question to the dude (whom is assumed to be my boss).
What the literal fuck?
I don't get exercised about much. But when people doubt my intelligence, I get pretty keyed up. I graduated from one of the top 10 universities in the world... early... with honors... working 30 hours per week through most of it... I worked my way from being an assistant to a Vice President at a financial institution in 7 years... I'm not the smartest or hardest working person in the world, but I'm certainly no slouch.
Which is why I get frustrated. Obviously frustrated. I'm treated with more respect and am given more benefit of the doubt on the finance side of my job than the technology side of my job. And when you walk into a room and the INSURANCE people are more diverse/accepting than the tech guys, you know there's a problem.
But, materially, there are problems in both sectors. The more I talk to other female friends, the more I realize the problem is pervasive in other sectors too.
When I go on business trips, I have two sets of "clients" I see. First are insurance brokers - they know I'm smart, but the second they see me, they feel like it's OK to drool on my carefully covered-up cleavage. (I used to be far less concerned about what I wore to work, as long as it was business appropriate, but after the third broker attempted to shove his tongue down my throat on a work trip, I decided it was time to invest in turtlenecks.) Second are the insurance buyers - these are usually technology companies, but minimally I'm interfacing with IT people even at non-tech companies. If these people are able to talk to me without drooling, they are not usually able to talk to me without dumbing down everything they say. Ev.Er.Y.Thing. "The machines they plug the cables into..." Ugh.
Why is it that some men seem incapable of assuming I have a brain in my pretty little head? And even when they assume I'm smart, they still feel like it's totally cool to hit on me. They assume that because I ask them to what I would consider a business dinner, we're going on a date.
In the immortal words of my Grandpa Wally - "keep your prick out of the payroll". Idiots.
It's the same freaking problem my Grandma Edith fought against - women don't have the mental acuity to understand politics... or is it business?... or is it technology?... Well, fuck. Now I'm confused too.
People say that women make different choices. People say that when women make the decision to not get married and not have kids and go into male-dominated fields, there is no pay gap.
Well whooptie-freakin'-do.
I have no children. I have no boyfriend, let alone the prospect of getting married, but yes... I probably make as much as the men that do what I do. All of those men have wives and families at home. All of them. Instead of having a husband and kids to support me at home, I have my retired mother help me with my laundry and errands - I don't have time to do them myself, and I feel guilty as hell about it. I also feel guilty as hell that I made the "choice" to focus on work over having kids. All I wanted to do was be a mom, but I felt like it would be irresponsible to do that if I couldn't support a family, or at least myself.
I wonder if the guys I work with feel guilty as hell that their wives do their laundry while they're busy making money?... I kind of doubt it.
Gentlemen, I know many of you reading this are not my intended audience, but in general, it's time to check your privilege. And it's time for those of you who realize this is a problem to actually do something about it.
If men think I'm stupid when they look at me, they are less likely to believe what I'm saying. And if they think you're smart when they look at you, they are more likely to believe what you're saying. This is what I mean by privilege. I do not have the privilege of assumed intelligence when I walk into a room, but the dude next to me who knew nothing about the topic did. It's not right, but he just did.
I'm sick of women being the only ones that fight this fight. I have several awesome dude friends that will speak up about this, but I need more. We need more.
I pray that the engineer who tried to explain server farms to me got chewed the hell out by his boss. I pray that my very flatly telling him "Yeah, I know what they do" woke him up a little. I pray the next time a women asks him a question, he doesn't try to dumb it down. But I kind of doubt that too.
Like our LGBT friends, I don't think women will start receiving a fair shake until people understand how pervasive the problem is. Women have to tell our stories. We can't keep taking it like it's OK. We can't keep trying to be the "cool girls" that aren't bothered when people treat us like shit. Similarly, we won't get anywhere until our outside friends (in this case, men) start speaking truth to power too.
Grandma Edith was a pragmatist, and I consider myself one too. I'm not proud. I just need things to change. Who's with me?
I asked a question of their head of internal infrastructure - "can you please describe your migration plans and timeline for moving from outsourced to owned data centers?" I realize that may sound technical to some - basically, I was asking what they were going to do about moving their computing systems from someone else's servers they pay to use to their own servers. The dude looked at me and started: "Well, currently, we use other people's servers for our data center, which is basically like the machines we plug the cables into..."
"Yeah, I know what they do."
(Looks shocked) "Oh, OK..."
This was right after they discussed something really technical without dumbing it down to a dude sitting next to me. I've known the guy for years. He doesn't work in the space often. He had no idea what they were talking about. That's no slight on him - there just aren't many people that do what I do, and fewer that have been doing it for as long as I have.
...
When I was a little girl, my Grandma June used to take great pride in telling me I was the first born daughter of a first born daughter of a first born daughter... seven generations back. While that is very special in many ways, yesterday I wasn't feeling so into it. Being a girl working in business isn't always all it was cracked up to be.
My mom burned her bra with her sister-in-law in feminist rallies when she was young. She then promptly got married and stayed home to raise me and my brother. That said, her basic belief was that her generation had fought the battle for future generations of women, and the workforce would be a fair place for me once I entered it.
I love my mom, but she was way off base.
The funny thing is, my great-great-grandmother, Edith Adora (Dansdill) Murray was a suffragette. She fought the fight so that my great-grandmother could vote the minute she came of age.
Just because one generation paves the way for a right to exist for the next... It doesn't mean that right is a given for the next generation. Grandma Edith may have paved the way for her two daughters to vote. She and her husband may have sent both of their daughters to college in an era when women just didn't do that. But just because my great-grandma had the right to go to college and had the vote doesn't mean she didn't face all kinds of discrimination at school or even the voting booth.
Similarly, my mother may have burned her bra for me to be able to "break through the glass ceiling", but I certainly haven't broken through yet, and I'm not sure it's possible. Or rather, it's possible, but only if you're willing to focus on that and nothing else, and only if you put up with a whole lot of shit. Men don't have to make the same choices to achieve the same life outcome.
My Grandma June went into the work force during WWII - she was a riveter in Richmond, CA. She was tiny, so they had her rivet in the nose of the ship, where most people couldn't fit. After the war ended, she kept on working. Grandma June is my mom's mother. She ended up working for my dad's dad (Grandpa Wally) in the assessor's office for Contra Costa County. She told me he was always very fair, but I always found it odd that all the women crunched the numbers, then Grandpa Wally checked for accuracy. It didn't seem to me like he did very much - though I realize that's oversimplifying everything significantly - Grandpa Wally was one of the smartest guys I've ever known, and always did very well in business.
Today, I go into a meeting, and whenever I ask a question that demonstrates my knowledge of the space, I get one of two reactions:
1) surprise - "holy hell - does she know what I'm talking about?"
2) confusion - "did she get lucky asking that question the right way? Is it possible she read up on the subject on her way here?"
Inevitably, either reaction ends with the person to whom I asked the question looking at the guy sitting next to me, who is almost always significantly junior to me, and directing the answer to my question to the dude (whom is assumed to be my boss).
What the literal fuck?
I don't get exercised about much. But when people doubt my intelligence, I get pretty keyed up. I graduated from one of the top 10 universities in the world... early... with honors... working 30 hours per week through most of it... I worked my way from being an assistant to a Vice President at a financial institution in 7 years... I'm not the smartest or hardest working person in the world, but I'm certainly no slouch.
Which is why I get frustrated. Obviously frustrated. I'm treated with more respect and am given more benefit of the doubt on the finance side of my job than the technology side of my job. And when you walk into a room and the INSURANCE people are more diverse/accepting than the tech guys, you know there's a problem.
But, materially, there are problems in both sectors. The more I talk to other female friends, the more I realize the problem is pervasive in other sectors too.
When I go on business trips, I have two sets of "clients" I see. First are insurance brokers - they know I'm smart, but the second they see me, they feel like it's OK to drool on my carefully covered-up cleavage. (I used to be far less concerned about what I wore to work, as long as it was business appropriate, but after the third broker attempted to shove his tongue down my throat on a work trip, I decided it was time to invest in turtlenecks.) Second are the insurance buyers - these are usually technology companies, but minimally I'm interfacing with IT people even at non-tech companies. If these people are able to talk to me without drooling, they are not usually able to talk to me without dumbing down everything they say. Ev.Er.Y.Thing. "The machines they plug the cables into..." Ugh.
Why is it that some men seem incapable of assuming I have a brain in my pretty little head? And even when they assume I'm smart, they still feel like it's totally cool to hit on me. They assume that because I ask them to what I would consider a business dinner, we're going on a date.
In the immortal words of my Grandpa Wally - "keep your prick out of the payroll". Idiots.
It's the same freaking problem my Grandma Edith fought against - women don't have the mental acuity to understand politics... or is it business?... or is it technology?... Well, fuck. Now I'm confused too.
People say that women make different choices. People say that when women make the decision to not get married and not have kids and go into male-dominated fields, there is no pay gap.
Well whooptie-freakin'-do.
I have no children. I have no boyfriend, let alone the prospect of getting married, but yes... I probably make as much as the men that do what I do. All of those men have wives and families at home. All of them. Instead of having a husband and kids to support me at home, I have my retired mother help me with my laundry and errands - I don't have time to do them myself, and I feel guilty as hell about it. I also feel guilty as hell that I made the "choice" to focus on work over having kids. All I wanted to do was be a mom, but I felt like it would be irresponsible to do that if I couldn't support a family, or at least myself.
I wonder if the guys I work with feel guilty as hell that their wives do their laundry while they're busy making money?... I kind of doubt it.
Gentlemen, I know many of you reading this are not my intended audience, but in general, it's time to check your privilege. And it's time for those of you who realize this is a problem to actually do something about it.
If men think I'm stupid when they look at me, they are less likely to believe what I'm saying. And if they think you're smart when they look at you, they are more likely to believe what you're saying. This is what I mean by privilege. I do not have the privilege of assumed intelligence when I walk into a room, but the dude next to me who knew nothing about the topic did. It's not right, but he just did.
I'm sick of women being the only ones that fight this fight. I have several awesome dude friends that will speak up about this, but I need more. We need more.
I pray that the engineer who tried to explain server farms to me got chewed the hell out by his boss. I pray that my very flatly telling him "Yeah, I know what they do" woke him up a little. I pray the next time a women asks him a question, he doesn't try to dumb it down. But I kind of doubt that too.
Like our LGBT friends, I don't think women will start receiving a fair shake until people understand how pervasive the problem is. Women have to tell our stories. We can't keep taking it like it's OK. We can't keep trying to be the "cool girls" that aren't bothered when people treat us like shit. Similarly, we won't get anywhere until our outside friends (in this case, men) start speaking truth to power too.
Grandma Edith was a pragmatist, and I consider myself one too. I'm not proud. I just need things to change. Who's with me?
Monday, August 11, 2014
The Most Famous American You've Never Heard Of...
Maybe I'm overstating things with the title. That said, my great-great-grandfather was a relatively historic figure. His name was Joseph Baker Donavan, and he was born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 1842. My great-grandfather, Wallace Collins Donavan was his youngest son, born in 1880. My grandfather, Wallace Collins Donavan, Jr. was born in Denver in 1923, the same year his grandfather, Joseph Baker Donavan - about whom I will write - died of heart disease in a Denver store.
According to accounts written later in his life, Grandpa Joe tried throughout his adventures to stay relatively well out of the press. Kitt Carson and Bill Cody were friends, but he shied away from the press that, whether or not encouraged, followed the more well-known figures of the era. There are lines about him in the histories of the Pony Express, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start with myth and better-documented occurrences...
Grandpa Joe was born on a farm in Pittsburgh, Penn to a family that had ties in the country back to the time of John Smith. Grandpa Joe's grandfather on his dad's side fought in the Revolutionary War at Bunker Hill. His father was a Captain, I believe in the War of 1812. The family were frontier people, which I think explains a bit where Grandpa Joe got a highly romanticized impression of adventuring.
At the age of 12, Grandpa Joe ran away from home to join an uncle who was a steamboat captain at Cairo, IL, Mark Twain-style. From here, most of his life is documented throughout the Denver Post of the early 20th Century. He road between Cairo, IL, to New Orleans, LA for 2 years, working for some of that time on the port in New Orleans. In 1856, he found himself in St. Louis and in the company of the sons of John Brown - literally. Like, the kids who got strung-up later for trying to forcibly free the slaves in Kansas. He decided to join them in a raid their father was conducting on Oalthe, KS. Again - Grandpa Joe was 14. He was grazed by a few bullets in the raid, but escaped largely undamaged. But from a very early age, it was obvious by his course of conduct that Grandpa Joe cared deeply in justice for all humans, even those of different skin colors and languages.
After the raid on Oalthe, Grandpa Joe signed up to become a government scout. He caught a train for Ft. Laramie to begin his work - the train was transporting livestock to supply the fort. I will admit that these specific details come from his son's notes, but tie in fairly closely to the documented portions of the story. Apparently, the train was hijacked by a group of Arapaho, and several of the horses / livestock were taken. Grandpa Joe and the few others aboard the train escaped and made for the fort.
This brings me to the portion of the story that I've been thinking about today. As a kid was shot in the streets of St. Louis and left to lay in the street for hours without an ambulance called for him. As people riot in the street while the family of the victim begs for peace. While I watched these images on the news this morning, I thought about Grandpa Joe.
It's a bit of a tenuous connection, I'll grant you. But there's something in the air. In San Francisco, we call it earthquake weather when it gets warm and overcast and a little humid - it's what the weather was like in 1906. Politically it feels like earthquake weather. It feels like there are a lot of people ready to set fire to the streets, and I kind of get it. But cooler heads must prevail.
Back to Grandpa Joe - he escaped the train and made it to the fort. There he found that the chief of the Cheyennes had been taken prisoner - charged with the robbing of the horses and livestock on the train. The chief, Sloanecka (according to most of the accounts, there were a few where his name was differently spelled), asserted his innocence, but the men in charge at the fort had already sentenced him to hang. Grandpa Joe snuck into the room where the chief was being held, tied to some manner of sawhorse, from what I can gather, and liberated (words from papers in 1910 were very heroic) the chief from imprisonment. He then gave the chief his own horse and sent him off.
The homies at the fort in the morning were not surprisingly angry. They threw Grandpa Joe in lockup of some sort, but several days later, the chief returned with the 5 Arapahoes responsible for the raid, as well as the horses and livestock. Grandpa Joe was released - by all accounts, he earned the respect of the fort's leaders and became a friend of the Cheyenne.
I don't want to over-romanticize my great-great-grandfather. I'm sure he could be a son-of-a-gun when taken to task, but in the overarching story of his life, he was known for acting in a way that helped people come together - helped differing parties understand one another. He did so often against his own physical safety, and he did so time and again. And in so doing, he changed the course of history for the better.
Grandpa Joe spent that winter with the Cheyenne, and managed to learn a bit of their language, as well as that of the Arapaho and 2 other tribes whose names I will butcher without proper source citation, which I don't have with me at the moment. There was a story published indicating that the Cheyenne plucked out all his eyebrows in some sort of ceremony to make him an honorary chief, and his eyebrows never grew back in. Whether or not credible, photos taken later in his life show he really didn't have eyebrows.
In the Spring, Grandpa Joe went to rejoin his parents, who had relocated to Salt Creek, NE. All indications from newspaper articles were that his mother, Rosanna, was pissed. I'm not sure whether it was while Grandpa Joe was at home, but the city of Lincoln, NE was founded in his father's (William Trimble Donavan's) frontier home in Salt Creek (predecessor name to Lincoln). They named it for their party's newly elected leader. They were abolitionists, radicals of their day, Republicans. Now it seems not quite to go together, for reasons we can get into separately, but which have largely to do with FDR almost a century later.
For the few years after his adventure with the Cheyenne, Grandpa Joe returned to government scout work, mapping most of Colorado and the Dakotas. While he was scouting, he and a small group of trappers camped the intersection of Cherry Creek and the Platt River. Grandpa Joe had "discovered" (or at least had been to before anyone else recorded) the site of present-day Denver. Years later, he would be honored in Industrial Parades and in Colorado Day celebrations, as he had been to the site of Denver on August 2, 1858 - in Colorado, pioneers to the area were generally known as '59ers, to give you some idea of the isolation and wilderness in which he found himself. It reinforces in my mind the meaning of the term 'Wild, Wild West'. The few players on the scene could act with relative impunity, but still Grandpa Joe decided to do right by whomever he could.
By the time 1860 rolled around, Grandpa Joe found himself called to St. Joseph, MO, to ride for the newly formed Pony Express. There are various references to him in their documented history, but generally only a few lines describing some squabble between settlers and natives he helped resolve, or in one instance, a story of him rescuing two settler girls from a band of Navajo on the war-path. (Please, please forgive me for the culturally insensitive references I'm making - I'm taking a lot of this verbiage from articles written in the 1910s, for the sake of brevity.)
While he was riding for the Pony Express, Grandpa Joe heard that shots had been fired on Fort Sumter from a passing group of pioneers. He returned to St. Louis, and immediately enlisted for the Union. According to papers published after the fact, Grandpa Joe fought throughout the war, was wounded 4 times, and each time returned to the field. I haven't yet confirmed this with actual military records. I do know that he was offered a government pension for his service later in life, which he refused.
O.G. Badass, Grandpa Joe.
After the war, Grandpa Joe returned to Colorado. At various points, according to his granddaughter, he owned the land on which the Brown Palace Hotel sits (sold for a pack of mules), and Donavan Ranch (a 980 acre ranch he sold back to the government, which would later become the US Airforce Academy). Incidentally, Grandpa Joe was the one who coined the Donavan family motto: "Buy High, Sell Low", which should surprise no one based on the aforementioned real estate deals. The family largely tries to ignore the motto these days, and is sometimes successful.
Back to the point... One of my favorite hymns is Battle Hymn of the Republic (for non-American audiences, Glory Glory Hallelujah). Most people don't know it's based on an even older religious song, which was modified to fit lyrics having to do with John Brown, the man Grandpa Joe followed into a raid in 1856. It was known as John Brown's Body - several versions were written as camps songs for Union soldiers, but I'll cite the one written by William Weston Patton.
John Brown's Body:
Old John Brown’s body lies moldering in the grave,
While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save;
But tho he lost his life while struggling for the slave,
His soul is marching on.
(Chorus) Glory, Glory, Hallelujah...
John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true and brave,
And Kansas knows his valor when he fought her rights to save;
Now, tho the grass grows green above his grave,
His soul is marching on.
(Chorus)
He captured Harper’s Ferry, with his nineteen men so few,
And frightened "Old Virginny" till she trembled thru and thru;
They hung him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew,
But his soul is marching on.
(Chorus)
John Brown was John the Baptist of the Christ we are to see,
Christ who of the bondmen shall the Liberator be,
And soon thruout the Sunny South the slaves shall all be free,
For his soul is marching on.
(Chorus)
The conflict that he heralded he looks from heaven to view,
On the army of the Union with its flag red, white and blue.
And heaven shall ring with anthems o’er the deed they mean to do,
For his soul is marching on.
(Chorus)
Ye soldiers of Freedom, then strike, while strike ye may,
The death blow of oppression in a better time and way,
For the dawn of old John Brown has brightened into day,
And his soul is marching on.
(Chorus)
... And heaven shall ring with anthems o'ver the deed they mean to do, for his soul is marching on... It makes me tear up in a totally non-sarcastic way.
My grandpa was never referenced as being an overly religious man. He was a master mason, for what that is worth, which meant he focused on morality throughout his life. This country used to have a deeply-felt, religious connection to justice for all, at least in many circles. Quakers ran the underground railroad. John Brown swore himself a warrior for God's justice and mercy. But generally, these were minority voices that weren't able to be fully galvanized until the support of the government was behind them OR the public opinion shifted. Grandpa Joe fought because he thought it was right. Other people fought for other reasons.
It became patently obvious that the situation was unjust - it had been obvious to many forever. But just because we now consider this outcome a given, we shouldn't expect that every voice within America at the time was behind the North as a liberator of the slaves, and the South as a defender of a terrifying practice. Most were, more or less reluctantly, fighting either to preserve the Union or to preserve individual and state freedoms. That's why brothers ended up fighting each other on the battlefield. I can't imagine there were so many families where one sibling and not the other came to feel slavery was an unjust institution - though there may have been. It wasn't because slavery was questionably moral - it was whether states and individuals had the right to differ from the values set out by the founders and to use that as a reason to leave the Union... Or it was about justice and the inalienable rights of all humans... Or it was about a religious calling... Or it was about the right to continue to preserve a way of life... Or it was about being too poor to avoid conscription... It was about a lot of things, but individual choices for why one engaged in the conflict weren't always just about what was obviously right and obviously wrong. Not then, and not now.
So too, I think we must remember in our current political climate, with current events headlines implicating stop-and-frisk, the prison industrial complex, stand-your-ground and other issues... Today, too, people stand on both sides of the divide for very different reasons. And if we are to ever come to a common ground, we must first understand that many of us have similar goals, but very different reasons for wanting to achieve them. And that's OK. The goal is what's important. It's easy to assume people standing across the aisle from you are just wrong... Obviously they're the Indians that stole the horses from the train - I mean, they're Indians, right?... But that's not going to get you anywhere, certainly not to the right conclusion. And viewing the world that way is basically self-defeating if you want people to get along and stop shooting each other. Sorry - them's the facts.
This country needs a dose of pragmatism.
I think we must remember to view these issues with an eye to our future legacy. Do we want our great-great-grandchildren to remember our generation as the one who hopelessly deadlocked over petty squabbles, could not find a solution to an obvious problem - who stood by and wrung their hands at the impossibility of fixing it all? Do we want to let differences in why we don't like things impact our shared desire and ability to change them?...
What sort of world will they inherit if we decide to do that? Isn't imagining that enough to make you angry? Because when I think of my great-great-grandpa Joe fighting at 14 years old in a raid to free the slaves, when common wisdom was the raid was crazy, it makes me really angry that people in positions of power (ahem, Congress) seem to be unable to enact a law, or even a policy, that might fix something... ANYTHING.
I don't really care what your reason for being angry is. I don't care if it is that you are fed up with a small, vocal minority in our country having sway over our political leaders to such an extent as to grind our government to a halt. I don't care if you're angry because a largely white-male government is making decisions that adversely impact non-white males, who are also supposed to be their constituents. I don't care if you're angry that you and your spouse can't cross state lines without worrying whether your marriage will be respected and/or legally recognized there. I don't care if you're angry that even though black people and white people do drugs at the same rate, black people are taking all the heat in terms of who gets sent to jail. I don't care if you're angry that kids are being shot in the streets by police officers that are sworn to protect them, and that somehow the only kids the police officers seem to need to shoot are the ones who are black. I don't care if you're angry that there are people, Americans, going down to the border to further terrorize little terrorized children, who didn't chose to come here in the first place. I don't care why you are angry. But I do care that you are angry. I do care that we are angry.
There were lots of guys throughout history like my Grandpa Joe. The fact that he did quite a bit in the country and is largely unrecognized gives me hope that there are other actors out there today, bucking the overwhelming urge we have historically felt (and largely given into) as a society to stay with the status-quo - to maintain comfortable realities for some citizens at the expense of others. We need to remember that this is unacceptable. And we need Grandpa Joes now.
If we are to learn from history, we must realize that change will only come when we are willing to speak out and act out for it. John Brown and Grandpa Joe were willing to do it before it was popular. So too, today someone will have to take the first step - to speak out and to act out.
Not to act out with violence as the kids in the streets of a St. Louis suburb, like we saw over the weekend. But to act out with kindness and compassion. Kindness in respecting the grieving of the families. Kindness in respecting the need for peace in our communities. Compassion in our taking some of the burden from those families. Compassion in taking some of the grief we commonly feel at the state of affairs and putting that grief to use.
We need to understand how our complacency in allowing the alarm bells to sound unheeded has led to this. When we have billions of dollars being pumped into the government from people who own prisons, is it any wonder we have lots of prisons? Why are we funding prisons instead of schools? When men are acquitted of shooting and killing a black child because they felt threatened by that black child, is it any wonder that other black children are shot? Where does that slippery slope go? Don't we all live with a certain level of perceived-threat from "others"? Hasn't it leached in from negative discourse in every sector - the harsher sentence for a black man than a white man for the same thing; an urgent feeling of dread as you see a police officer walking toward you, afraid he'll stop you for your mere presence on the street; a second glance at the black kid on the corner, when you probably wouldn't even have noticed a white kid standing there... The triggers for conflict or anger on both sides are pretty easy to state, whether or not there's any reason for them... If we want to constrain the argument to purely racial and personal terms, OK. As a white woman, the only man that's ever held me up at gunpoint was certainly not a black man. So... what, me worry?
In the immortal (paraphrased) words of Katt Williams - black people, get yourself a white friend; and white people, get yourself a black friend. Grandpa Joe wasn't able to advocate effectively for the Native Americans until he understood their language and could see their concerns in the flesh. I'll admit that when I saw a child lying in the street after having been shot in the head by a police officer, I didn't understand the reality of that... I'm not sure I can, not that anyone should have to. My world has never given me a view into that sort of experience. But understanding how my black friends experience these news stories has been eye-opening. This could be one of them - their kid. And it makes me so mad I want to scream. It's easy not to worry when it isn't going to be your kid or your friend's kid. But how do we still have cities with this level of racial strife, and how are they the same literal locations that were hotbeds of that conflict in Grandpa Joe's time?
We aren't going to be able to fix any of these problems until we understand how they're actually impacting people. As much as going John Brown on some folks with a sword and declaring oneself the righteous soldier of God sounds good to me sometimes, it's not overly practical in today's era. It obviously wasn't very practical back then either... I'd argue Grandpa Joe's path was no less principled, but he lived to be 81, and died of natural causes. All I'm saying is, it can be done. Just because people might not end up writing songs about you doesn't mean you can't make a difference.
According to accounts written later in his life, Grandpa Joe tried throughout his adventures to stay relatively well out of the press. Kitt Carson and Bill Cody were friends, but he shied away from the press that, whether or not encouraged, followed the more well-known figures of the era. There are lines about him in the histories of the Pony Express, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start with myth and better-documented occurrences...
Grandpa Joe was born on a farm in Pittsburgh, Penn to a family that had ties in the country back to the time of John Smith. Grandpa Joe's grandfather on his dad's side fought in the Revolutionary War at Bunker Hill. His father was a Captain, I believe in the War of 1812. The family were frontier people, which I think explains a bit where Grandpa Joe got a highly romanticized impression of adventuring.
At the age of 12, Grandpa Joe ran away from home to join an uncle who was a steamboat captain at Cairo, IL, Mark Twain-style. From here, most of his life is documented throughout the Denver Post of the early 20th Century. He road between Cairo, IL, to New Orleans, LA for 2 years, working for some of that time on the port in New Orleans. In 1856, he found himself in St. Louis and in the company of the sons of John Brown - literally. Like, the kids who got strung-up later for trying to forcibly free the slaves in Kansas. He decided to join them in a raid their father was conducting on Oalthe, KS. Again - Grandpa Joe was 14. He was grazed by a few bullets in the raid, but escaped largely undamaged. But from a very early age, it was obvious by his course of conduct that Grandpa Joe cared deeply in justice for all humans, even those of different skin colors and languages.
After the raid on Oalthe, Grandpa Joe signed up to become a government scout. He caught a train for Ft. Laramie to begin his work - the train was transporting livestock to supply the fort. I will admit that these specific details come from his son's notes, but tie in fairly closely to the documented portions of the story. Apparently, the train was hijacked by a group of Arapaho, and several of the horses / livestock were taken. Grandpa Joe and the few others aboard the train escaped and made for the fort.
This brings me to the portion of the story that I've been thinking about today. As a kid was shot in the streets of St. Louis and left to lay in the street for hours without an ambulance called for him. As people riot in the street while the family of the victim begs for peace. While I watched these images on the news this morning, I thought about Grandpa Joe.
It's a bit of a tenuous connection, I'll grant you. But there's something in the air. In San Francisco, we call it earthquake weather when it gets warm and overcast and a little humid - it's what the weather was like in 1906. Politically it feels like earthquake weather. It feels like there are a lot of people ready to set fire to the streets, and I kind of get it. But cooler heads must prevail.
Back to Grandpa Joe - he escaped the train and made it to the fort. There he found that the chief of the Cheyennes had been taken prisoner - charged with the robbing of the horses and livestock on the train. The chief, Sloanecka (according to most of the accounts, there were a few where his name was differently spelled), asserted his innocence, but the men in charge at the fort had already sentenced him to hang. Grandpa Joe snuck into the room where the chief was being held, tied to some manner of sawhorse, from what I can gather, and liberated (words from papers in 1910 were very heroic) the chief from imprisonment. He then gave the chief his own horse and sent him off.
The homies at the fort in the morning were not surprisingly angry. They threw Grandpa Joe in lockup of some sort, but several days later, the chief returned with the 5 Arapahoes responsible for the raid, as well as the horses and livestock. Grandpa Joe was released - by all accounts, he earned the respect of the fort's leaders and became a friend of the Cheyenne.
I don't want to over-romanticize my great-great-grandfather. I'm sure he could be a son-of-a-gun when taken to task, but in the overarching story of his life, he was known for acting in a way that helped people come together - helped differing parties understand one another. He did so often against his own physical safety, and he did so time and again. And in so doing, he changed the course of history for the better.
Grandpa Joe spent that winter with the Cheyenne, and managed to learn a bit of their language, as well as that of the Arapaho and 2 other tribes whose names I will butcher without proper source citation, which I don't have with me at the moment. There was a story published indicating that the Cheyenne plucked out all his eyebrows in some sort of ceremony to make him an honorary chief, and his eyebrows never grew back in. Whether or not credible, photos taken later in his life show he really didn't have eyebrows.
In the Spring, Grandpa Joe went to rejoin his parents, who had relocated to Salt Creek, NE. All indications from newspaper articles were that his mother, Rosanna, was pissed. I'm not sure whether it was while Grandpa Joe was at home, but the city of Lincoln, NE was founded in his father's (William Trimble Donavan's) frontier home in Salt Creek (predecessor name to Lincoln). They named it for their party's newly elected leader. They were abolitionists, radicals of their day, Republicans. Now it seems not quite to go together, for reasons we can get into separately, but which have largely to do with FDR almost a century later.
For the few years after his adventure with the Cheyenne, Grandpa Joe returned to government scout work, mapping most of Colorado and the Dakotas. While he was scouting, he and a small group of trappers camped the intersection of Cherry Creek and the Platt River. Grandpa Joe had "discovered" (or at least had been to before anyone else recorded) the site of present-day Denver. Years later, he would be honored in Industrial Parades and in Colorado Day celebrations, as he had been to the site of Denver on August 2, 1858 - in Colorado, pioneers to the area were generally known as '59ers, to give you some idea of the isolation and wilderness in which he found himself. It reinforces in my mind the meaning of the term 'Wild, Wild West'. The few players on the scene could act with relative impunity, but still Grandpa Joe decided to do right by whomever he could.
By the time 1860 rolled around, Grandpa Joe found himself called to St. Joseph, MO, to ride for the newly formed Pony Express. There are various references to him in their documented history, but generally only a few lines describing some squabble between settlers and natives he helped resolve, or in one instance, a story of him rescuing two settler girls from a band of Navajo on the war-path. (Please, please forgive me for the culturally insensitive references I'm making - I'm taking a lot of this verbiage from articles written in the 1910s, for the sake of brevity.)
While he was riding for the Pony Express, Grandpa Joe heard that shots had been fired on Fort Sumter from a passing group of pioneers. He returned to St. Louis, and immediately enlisted for the Union. According to papers published after the fact, Grandpa Joe fought throughout the war, was wounded 4 times, and each time returned to the field. I haven't yet confirmed this with actual military records. I do know that he was offered a government pension for his service later in life, which he refused.
O.G. Badass, Grandpa Joe.
After the war, Grandpa Joe returned to Colorado. At various points, according to his granddaughter, he owned the land on which the Brown Palace Hotel sits (sold for a pack of mules), and Donavan Ranch (a 980 acre ranch he sold back to the government, which would later become the US Airforce Academy). Incidentally, Grandpa Joe was the one who coined the Donavan family motto: "Buy High, Sell Low", which should surprise no one based on the aforementioned real estate deals. The family largely tries to ignore the motto these days, and is sometimes successful.
Back to the point... One of my favorite hymns is Battle Hymn of the Republic (for non-American audiences, Glory Glory Hallelujah). Most people don't know it's based on an even older religious song, which was modified to fit lyrics having to do with John Brown, the man Grandpa Joe followed into a raid in 1856. It was known as John Brown's Body - several versions were written as camps songs for Union soldiers, but I'll cite the one written by William Weston Patton.
John Brown's Body:
Old John Brown’s body lies moldering in the grave,
While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save;
But tho he lost his life while struggling for the slave,
His soul is marching on.
(Chorus) Glory, Glory, Hallelujah...
John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true and brave,
And Kansas knows his valor when he fought her rights to save;
Now, tho the grass grows green above his grave,
His soul is marching on.
(Chorus)
He captured Harper’s Ferry, with his nineteen men so few,
And frightened "Old Virginny" till she trembled thru and thru;
They hung him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew,
But his soul is marching on.
(Chorus)
John Brown was John the Baptist of the Christ we are to see,
Christ who of the bondmen shall the Liberator be,
And soon thruout the Sunny South the slaves shall all be free,
For his soul is marching on.
(Chorus)
The conflict that he heralded he looks from heaven to view,
On the army of the Union with its flag red, white and blue.
And heaven shall ring with anthems o’er the deed they mean to do,
For his soul is marching on.
(Chorus)
Ye soldiers of Freedom, then strike, while strike ye may,
The death blow of oppression in a better time and way,
For the dawn of old John Brown has brightened into day,
And his soul is marching on.
(Chorus)
... And heaven shall ring with anthems o'ver the deed they mean to do, for his soul is marching on... It makes me tear up in a totally non-sarcastic way.
My grandpa was never referenced as being an overly religious man. He was a master mason, for what that is worth, which meant he focused on morality throughout his life. This country used to have a deeply-felt, religious connection to justice for all, at least in many circles. Quakers ran the underground railroad. John Brown swore himself a warrior for God's justice and mercy. But generally, these were minority voices that weren't able to be fully galvanized until the support of the government was behind them OR the public opinion shifted. Grandpa Joe fought because he thought it was right. Other people fought for other reasons.
It became patently obvious that the situation was unjust - it had been obvious to many forever. But just because we now consider this outcome a given, we shouldn't expect that every voice within America at the time was behind the North as a liberator of the slaves, and the South as a defender of a terrifying practice. Most were, more or less reluctantly, fighting either to preserve the Union or to preserve individual and state freedoms. That's why brothers ended up fighting each other on the battlefield. I can't imagine there were so many families where one sibling and not the other came to feel slavery was an unjust institution - though there may have been. It wasn't because slavery was questionably moral - it was whether states and individuals had the right to differ from the values set out by the founders and to use that as a reason to leave the Union... Or it was about justice and the inalienable rights of all humans... Or it was about a religious calling... Or it was about the right to continue to preserve a way of life... Or it was about being too poor to avoid conscription... It was about a lot of things, but individual choices for why one engaged in the conflict weren't always just about what was obviously right and obviously wrong. Not then, and not now.
So too, I think we must remember in our current political climate, with current events headlines implicating stop-and-frisk, the prison industrial complex, stand-your-ground and other issues... Today, too, people stand on both sides of the divide for very different reasons. And if we are to ever come to a common ground, we must first understand that many of us have similar goals, but very different reasons for wanting to achieve them. And that's OK. The goal is what's important. It's easy to assume people standing across the aisle from you are just wrong... Obviously they're the Indians that stole the horses from the train - I mean, they're Indians, right?... But that's not going to get you anywhere, certainly not to the right conclusion. And viewing the world that way is basically self-defeating if you want people to get along and stop shooting each other. Sorry - them's the facts.
This country needs a dose of pragmatism.
I think we must remember to view these issues with an eye to our future legacy. Do we want our great-great-grandchildren to remember our generation as the one who hopelessly deadlocked over petty squabbles, could not find a solution to an obvious problem - who stood by and wrung their hands at the impossibility of fixing it all? Do we want to let differences in why we don't like things impact our shared desire and ability to change them?...
What sort of world will they inherit if we decide to do that? Isn't imagining that enough to make you angry? Because when I think of my great-great-grandpa Joe fighting at 14 years old in a raid to free the slaves, when common wisdom was the raid was crazy, it makes me really angry that people in positions of power (ahem, Congress) seem to be unable to enact a law, or even a policy, that might fix something... ANYTHING.
I don't really care what your reason for being angry is. I don't care if it is that you are fed up with a small, vocal minority in our country having sway over our political leaders to such an extent as to grind our government to a halt. I don't care if you're angry because a largely white-male government is making decisions that adversely impact non-white males, who are also supposed to be their constituents. I don't care if you're angry that you and your spouse can't cross state lines without worrying whether your marriage will be respected and/or legally recognized there. I don't care if you're angry that even though black people and white people do drugs at the same rate, black people are taking all the heat in terms of who gets sent to jail. I don't care if you're angry that kids are being shot in the streets by police officers that are sworn to protect them, and that somehow the only kids the police officers seem to need to shoot are the ones who are black. I don't care if you're angry that there are people, Americans, going down to the border to further terrorize little terrorized children, who didn't chose to come here in the first place. I don't care why you are angry. But I do care that you are angry. I do care that we are angry.
There were lots of guys throughout history like my Grandpa Joe. The fact that he did quite a bit in the country and is largely unrecognized gives me hope that there are other actors out there today, bucking the overwhelming urge we have historically felt (and largely given into) as a society to stay with the status-quo - to maintain comfortable realities for some citizens at the expense of others. We need to remember that this is unacceptable. And we need Grandpa Joes now.
If we are to learn from history, we must realize that change will only come when we are willing to speak out and act out for it. John Brown and Grandpa Joe were willing to do it before it was popular. So too, today someone will have to take the first step - to speak out and to act out.
Not to act out with violence as the kids in the streets of a St. Louis suburb, like we saw over the weekend. But to act out with kindness and compassion. Kindness in respecting the grieving of the families. Kindness in respecting the need for peace in our communities. Compassion in our taking some of the burden from those families. Compassion in taking some of the grief we commonly feel at the state of affairs and putting that grief to use.
We need to understand how our complacency in allowing the alarm bells to sound unheeded has led to this. When we have billions of dollars being pumped into the government from people who own prisons, is it any wonder we have lots of prisons? Why are we funding prisons instead of schools? When men are acquitted of shooting and killing a black child because they felt threatened by that black child, is it any wonder that other black children are shot? Where does that slippery slope go? Don't we all live with a certain level of perceived-threat from "others"? Hasn't it leached in from negative discourse in every sector - the harsher sentence for a black man than a white man for the same thing; an urgent feeling of dread as you see a police officer walking toward you, afraid he'll stop you for your mere presence on the street; a second glance at the black kid on the corner, when you probably wouldn't even have noticed a white kid standing there... The triggers for conflict or anger on both sides are pretty easy to state, whether or not there's any reason for them... If we want to constrain the argument to purely racial and personal terms, OK. As a white woman, the only man that's ever held me up at gunpoint was certainly not a black man. So... what, me worry?
In the immortal (paraphrased) words of Katt Williams - black people, get yourself a white friend; and white people, get yourself a black friend. Grandpa Joe wasn't able to advocate effectively for the Native Americans until he understood their language and could see their concerns in the flesh. I'll admit that when I saw a child lying in the street after having been shot in the head by a police officer, I didn't understand the reality of that... I'm not sure I can, not that anyone should have to. My world has never given me a view into that sort of experience. But understanding how my black friends experience these news stories has been eye-opening. This could be one of them - their kid. And it makes me so mad I want to scream. It's easy not to worry when it isn't going to be your kid or your friend's kid. But how do we still have cities with this level of racial strife, and how are they the same literal locations that were hotbeds of that conflict in Grandpa Joe's time?
We aren't going to be able to fix any of these problems until we understand how they're actually impacting people. As much as going John Brown on some folks with a sword and declaring oneself the righteous soldier of God sounds good to me sometimes, it's not overly practical in today's era. It obviously wasn't very practical back then either... I'd argue Grandpa Joe's path was no less principled, but he lived to be 81, and died of natural causes. All I'm saying is, it can be done. Just because people might not end up writing songs about you doesn't mean you can't make a difference.
Thursday, August 7, 2014
14th Generation American
I am a 14th Generation American. The majority of my ancestors came here in the 1600s - both Mom's side and Dad's. I don't think this makes me more American than anyone else, but it does give me a relatively unique view of the Nation's history.
My family was on the Mayflower. My family came to New Amsterdam from the Netherlands, well before the English got there and started calling it New York. My family was Quaker and came over with William Penn. My family were Methodist circuit riding ministers doing tent revivals throughout the South. We fought in the French-Indian War; The Revolutionary War; The War of 1812; The Civil War (both sides); The Spanish-American War; WWI; WWII; and Korea - and that's just what I know about for sure.
I'm proud as hell of my family history, and I'm proud as hell of this country. I'd be pretty ungrateful if I weren't.
And yet...
Because I'm what some people would consider a "Hippy Berkeley Liberal", I'm somehow not patriotic to some, and it's really starting to piss me off.
I'd like to start this blog by talking about the last member of my family to come to the US - she got here in 1884. Christina White was my 2nd Great Grandmother, and was sent here alone by her parents from Scotland. She was 7. She landed in New York. She was put on a train to Chicago, where she had a distant relative. That relative put her onto another train to Colorado. She had no family here. She became a boarder. Eventually, her father John came to join her and became an American citizen, but by then she was grown.
So... That was 4 generations back. Ellis Island hadn't opened yet, and wouldn't for almost a decade.
Perhaps you see where I'm going with this. I hear vitriolic speech on the news about immigrants - especially kids, and I am utterly amazed at the depths to which this country's conscience has fallen. There have always been newly arrived Americans that felt their generation should be the last one - that no one else should be let in after they got here. Um... So, do they realize that the entire reason we became a great nation is that the hardest working immigrants in the world came here and built it? We are great because we welcome everyone. "Give me your tired, your poor..." etc. etc... All my ancestors were here before Ellis Island. What if they had all said, "Nope, not so fast, foreigners. Stay out."? I'm sure some of them wanted to. Even scarier, what if they said that AND succeeded?
But they didn't. We're all here; we are the richest nation on earth. And for as much as I love this country, I don't blindly feel that everything we've ever decided to do has been justified. We sent the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears (even though the Supreme Court ruled President Jackson couldn't do it - how's that for unlawful executive action?). We interned Americans of Japanese ancestry. "We tortured some folks." America went through a period of pretty significant international "interference" starting with the Panama Canal and running right through the IMF/WB. There's a lot, but it certainly doesn't offset (in my mind) all the good we've done in the world.
Let's go back to G-ma Christina for a moment. Her family wasn't running from oppression. Her parents knew her life would be better here, and that was good enough for them AND for the USA. Her parents didn't have to worry that people in Glasgow were going to rape her, decapitate her, and roll around town using her head as a hood ornament on their buggies. They just wanted her to have a chance they hadn't.
And now we have kids coming to the border. They are terrified. And what do we say?
Well, most of us say "you poor little thing, let's get you some soup and a blanket". But for some reasons there are other people who show up with threatening signs telling a bunch of traumatized kids to "go home". Many of them don't have homes or families, you idiots.
Why do I have to tell you this? Are you stupid? OR are you fully aware of their struggle and choose not to care? How do you expect often illiterate, Spanish-speaking kids to know our laws? Or care? Did we respect their laws when we decided to oust their democratically elected governments in favor of dictatorships because we felt those leaders would be more politically advantageous to us? Nope. But now failed governments (often installed by the U.S.) have yielded gangs and violence and often corrupt law enforcement that allow people to be terrorized. But, no, don't come here where it's safe. We won't help you.
Yeah... give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, or don't.
My family was on the Mayflower. My family came to New Amsterdam from the Netherlands, well before the English got there and started calling it New York. My family was Quaker and came over with William Penn. My family were Methodist circuit riding ministers doing tent revivals throughout the South. We fought in the French-Indian War; The Revolutionary War; The War of 1812; The Civil War (both sides); The Spanish-American War; WWI; WWII; and Korea - and that's just what I know about for sure.
I'm proud as hell of my family history, and I'm proud as hell of this country. I'd be pretty ungrateful if I weren't.
And yet...
Because I'm what some people would consider a "Hippy Berkeley Liberal", I'm somehow not patriotic to some, and it's really starting to piss me off.
I'd like to start this blog by talking about the last member of my family to come to the US - she got here in 1884. Christina White was my 2nd Great Grandmother, and was sent here alone by her parents from Scotland. She was 7. She landed in New York. She was put on a train to Chicago, where she had a distant relative. That relative put her onto another train to Colorado. She had no family here. She became a boarder. Eventually, her father John came to join her and became an American citizen, but by then she was grown.
So... That was 4 generations back. Ellis Island hadn't opened yet, and wouldn't for almost a decade.
Perhaps you see where I'm going with this. I hear vitriolic speech on the news about immigrants - especially kids, and I am utterly amazed at the depths to which this country's conscience has fallen. There have always been newly arrived Americans that felt their generation should be the last one - that no one else should be let in after they got here. Um... So, do they realize that the entire reason we became a great nation is that the hardest working immigrants in the world came here and built it? We are great because we welcome everyone. "Give me your tired, your poor..." etc. etc... All my ancestors were here before Ellis Island. What if they had all said, "Nope, not so fast, foreigners. Stay out."? I'm sure some of them wanted to. Even scarier, what if they said that AND succeeded?
But they didn't. We're all here; we are the richest nation on earth. And for as much as I love this country, I don't blindly feel that everything we've ever decided to do has been justified. We sent the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears (even though the Supreme Court ruled President Jackson couldn't do it - how's that for unlawful executive action?). We interned Americans of Japanese ancestry. "We tortured some folks." America went through a period of pretty significant international "interference" starting with the Panama Canal and running right through the IMF/WB. There's a lot, but it certainly doesn't offset (in my mind) all the good we've done in the world.
Let's go back to G-ma Christina for a moment. Her family wasn't running from oppression. Her parents knew her life would be better here, and that was good enough for them AND for the USA. Her parents didn't have to worry that people in Glasgow were going to rape her, decapitate her, and roll around town using her head as a hood ornament on their buggies. They just wanted her to have a chance they hadn't.
And now we have kids coming to the border. They are terrified. And what do we say?
Well, most of us say "you poor little thing, let's get you some soup and a blanket". But for some reasons there are other people who show up with threatening signs telling a bunch of traumatized kids to "go home". Many of them don't have homes or families, you idiots.
Why do I have to tell you this? Are you stupid? OR are you fully aware of their struggle and choose not to care? How do you expect often illiterate, Spanish-speaking kids to know our laws? Or care? Did we respect their laws when we decided to oust their democratically elected governments in favor of dictatorships because we felt those leaders would be more politically advantageous to us? Nope. But now failed governments (often installed by the U.S.) have yielded gangs and violence and often corrupt law enforcement that allow people to be terrorized. But, no, don't come here where it's safe. We won't help you.
Yeah... give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, or don't.
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