A thousand little rock-hammers

Readers, I’ve got a wishlist.

All year I encounter anti-Christianity stuff, often posted as funny and there’s always a holiday uptick.  I’m pretty sure it’s reaction to atrocities genuinely unworthy of tolerance or respect, that the institutional church absolutely is guilty of.

Only, the things getting insulted are unrelated to atrocities: our alleged “fairy tales,” “sky daddy,” “invisible friends,” “magic cookies.”

 

Two things:  the feeding, healing, resurrection miracle narratives are not the cause of atrocities.  The narratives long predate the political juggernaut church.  The first followers of the Christian narrative were the persecuted - an outlaw movement.  The establishment could not stamp it out, no matter how brutally they tried, so they finally decided to harness it to expand their wealth and  power.  The power-mongers don’t care squat about the narrative, they just use it. “We won’t feed y’all to lions anymore. Come be Christian Soldiers” was calculated, and brilliant.

Correlation — the faith of beliefs, and the establishment religion of conquest — is not causation.

  

Thing 2:  Mocking the beliefs while you make careful effort to honor and respect pagan, indigenous, Eastern spiritual traditions THAT ARE JUST AS WOO AS THE CHRISTIANITY WOO-NESS YOU EXPRESS CONTEMPT FOR is something I would ask everybody to just…think about.  Ok?  Just ponder whether it’s logical?

Anytime a Christian makes even the gentlest protest about being told their faith is abuse apologetics hiding in infantile comfort objects, someone’s gonna say “You’re a hypocrite for not ‘turning the other cheek.’ ”   This means shut up.   Sorry, it’s not going to fly.  I obviously have an opinion on whether treating each other this way has a point. Mine is that the divisiveness in our world isn’t driven only by a big sledgehammer, but by a thousand little rock-hammers that splinter us into thousands of tiny “I’m superior to you” fragments.  The belief issue is only one such issue, but it matters, maybe to people you don’t want to hurt with bitter words, even in jokes.

Me and Membership

(Blah blah social justice wyt lady personal journey, blah blah.)

I wrote about the end of my library career waaay back in 2012, and I'll leave the details there, but the gist is that a seriously disturbed library volunteer waged an inexplicable, literally baseless, hate campaign against one of my employees.

A trustee told me to begin the firing process for this employee.  It was unethical, illegal, and unearned and I wouldn’t do it.   He then began a Machiavellian campaign to get rid of me.

And then another trustee — we had two who represented our area — took me to lunch. She diplomatically expressed her lack of support for Other Trustee and for Library Boss, and said she'd like to see me stay.

So, there in 1994, I'm sitting across the table, touched and grateful for the first show of support by anyone with power in this situation. But also wondering why it hadn't come soon enough.  I was worn out and I'd already burned my bridges. Figuring out whether I was handling it right, or I was a failure seemed irrelevant.

What this 1994 event has to do with 2021 is this:

This was the event that made me look at how caring about my reputation was making my life impossible.   I’d gotten a total witches' brew of messages all my life, from a bunch of different sources. Summer camp said I was crappy, my 4th grade teacher thought I was great, etc. etc.

Leaving the job didn’t resolve it, in the face of years of contradictory messages.  Was I a Good Witch or a Bad Witch?

 

Forming a sense of self starts with input — family first, but also society and culture. All these, though, are opinions of people with their own damage, needs, agendas both good and bad, their own wisdom or ignorance or love of wielding power, or their simple stupidity.  

So the next step was realizing that life required a sorting process, to at least try to know myself.  I’m still lousy at it, yet no one but me could do it accurately at all.

And yeah, you're maybe liking this, up to this point, but here's what a lot of people won't like.

I’ve never called myself an ally.

It’s not a term anybody should award herself anyway, it’s about standards determined by others, and I think claiming or seeking it is unhealthy.  I’ve tried, awarding myself a summer camp “G” because I thought I deserved it, and realizing that it was the acceptance, not the ornament, that I really both craved and needed to let go of. 

Even if my basic values are strong for equality, democracy, voting rights, ending racism and discrimination on religion, ethnicity, gender-anything, ending economic injustice, and line up 90% with everyone else, I can’t agree to follow an agenda set by others  ; and that’s pretty much the dictionary definition of being an ally. 

Liberal is a label I get to give myself without seeking approval. There’s debate about what earns people the Liberal label too, but there’s no authority making those decisions. Being an ally, though, does mean stepping back and letting those with whom we’re allying take the lead and determine what we should support and oppose. I can’t commit to that. 

I do know that belonging doesn’t require lockstep thinking, debate is ok.  But. There are things that are considered too essential to argue with, and that pretty much get my membership rescinded.  And they baffle me.

Sweeping statements like “politically correct just means being a decent person” are a Thing that I’m supposed to believe, only I think that statement is bullshit.

If I say that some campaign that I think is absurd is political correctness run amuck, I’m told that it means “I support treating people like crap.”  No.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that and I don’t support that. 

You may think Snow White reinforces rape culture.  I think that’s absurd.

No, some white kid wearing dreds is not doing a damn thing wrong. I’m very wary of the campaign against “cultural appropriation” at all, yeah, really, which makes me poor ally material.

No, Horton Hears a Who is not a story of White Saviorism.

Here’s an exact quote I am unapologetically not going to identify or attribute :

You might be wondering what [Game of Thrones] has to do with a radical qtpoc politics. Much of the GoT fandom probably cannot feel with and for people in the real world who face structural violence on a daily basis, the most vulnerable to everyday systems of exploitation.

Maybe some readers agree with me that that’s loony, but I guarantee that an unbroken stream of “So insightful!” and “Thank you for enlightening me!” was the response it got.

Yes, social media lets us cocoon with those who are like-minded, which explains some of the apparent unanimity that’s, in truth, not unanimous at all.  But the craving for acceptance that the sheer quantity of it represents is a real deal. 

I have trouble being polite about such lunacy but I’m ok with bypassing the GoT  type conversations altogether.  Other things, though, seem too important for that.

If you’re tempted to explain to me why I’m wrong on these issues, please know that it has been explained to me thoroughly, and you’re welcome to disagree but the reason for this post isn’t to engage about single issues.  I didn’t offer them to try to convince y’all to agree, and it’s fine if you don’t.  They’re here as illustrations of why “ally” isn’t a good fit for me.

I understand I’m disqualified to be an ally, not because of a particular opinion, but because I can’t agree with having standards set for me, not when they’re about about right and wrong.

Here we run into a good example:

This is the point at which I’m expected to add a line about how, of course, I’m asserting my right to agency and to choose my battles, while vulnerable people live their lives with this agency too often denied them.

It’s true.  But my neglecting to type it in doesn’t mean I really forgot my privilege, and typing it makes no difference in changing a thing on earth for these vulnerable people.

Typing it serves exactly one purpose : to flash my Hall Pass to maintain my membership in acceptable standing.  Seriously.   

There are a lot of us, people of privilege who heavily support justice and equality while enjoying safe and quiet housing, free exercise of their rights, well-stocked pantries, generally a nice personal comfort level.   

If we place the required acknowledgment where it’s called-for, we don’t get called out for trying to have both privilege and acceptance as an ally.  No one expects me to relinquish my safety and comfort, only to voice awareness of it.   My objection to trying for ally status is that it’s based on the properly placed disclaimers, not on the values I live.

It’s not based on having awareness, it’s based on demonstrating awareness.  

To whom?  Who stamps my hall pass, but more importantly, what does that do for any of the victims of violence and injustice?

Liberals berating — if done gently, it’s “reminding” — other liberals has not, in several years of social media politics, made the real problems of, and deadly dangers to, BIPOC and LGBTQ people get even slightly better.  Things are getting worse.  Violence and injustice come down on the vulnerable harder than ever, while Liberalism is being identified with rigid and sometimes irrational political correctness, hurting our winning elections or changing anything.

Did it matter if supporters were posting solid black squares as their Insta profile pictures for BLM, and one celeb had a thin white border around all her pix including that one?

The absurdity there is not that hers was the right way to do it.  That’s another one I’m not going to address, because it’s separate debate from the debate we need to have, which is:  

Let’s say it was the wrong way.  Did it do one single thing to weaken the fight for racial justice?   Lots ranted about it, but does that mean it wasn’t adequate support for BLM, or are we just desperately in need of something to blow off a shitload of steam about?  I call it the latter.

Maybe a bunch of us really believe that statements like “Due process is a basic right that still applies in sex crime cases” or “Friends wasn’t ‘problematic’ for being about a group of white people” cause actual harm.

The beratings and debates happen in liberal bubbles nowhere near the violence and injustice.  They happen between people who are on the same side against violence and injustice.  That we can solve anything by creating an Allowed position on And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street or whether Al Franken should have a hearing — not be exonerated, just have a bleeding hearing(!) —  is a delusion.

It’s a wasteful fight against at best, soft targets, at worst, unimportant ones.  We need to feel we’ve made some small difference somewhere.  People are being slaughtered.  We’re horribly helpless against atrocity, but we can go after Scrambled Eggs Super.  We’ll debate whether a Black actor cast to portray a real life historic Black person is dark enough. We’ll berate a social justice activist for not including the disclaimer line.

I haven’t totally lost faith in sanity prevailing.  The flap about the biographical movie faded pretty well.  The outrage about “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” did die down, corrected when it was established that it’s a female empowerment song, not a rape culture song. Good, but too many did not.

No, supporting what I believe is right, is not “centering myself,” it’s centering a position that I sincerely believe supports justice on an issue.

Yes, I’m “staying in my lane.”

Trying, however imperfectly, to uphold justice IS my lane.

Graymatter 2001-2016. And leaving.

We're coming up on four months since we lost Graymatter, and I've been avoiding writing about it.

I try not to batter myself over honest mistakes, but all I can seem to write is that we had a gutwrenching, difficult year, the best I could do sucked, I feel like crap.  Then, that invites people to tell me how great I am and how it's not my fault.  It's like trolling for comfort.  Don't do it.  Just read on.

We moved in November 2014, to what we thought was the perfect house, our positive step into a happy new situation after a very bad couple years.

We were sure it would be paradise for cats.  Nooks and crannies, walled garden.

Instead, we found that the previous owner had made it a feral cat colony, fed them, let them shelter in the crawlspace, and definitely let them inside.

Graymatter was driven insane by the proximity to the ground, by the constant prowling of other cats around doors and under floors, their smells.  She spray-marked all these places, constantly.

Add to that her constant campaign to drive her brother Downy from the house, a project that escalated after he was seriously ill in 2012 but dared to get well instead of dying as she wished him to.  I joked for a decade about her dislike of him, but as it grew into some cat version of hate it went beyond my ability to joke.

In the new house we had to tear out the laundry floor to the studs, treat the studs with odor-combatting chemicals, and replace it with tile.  We had to close her out of one room, then another, then we simply divided the house.

She lived on one side.  Downy and Scooter on the other.  Gray felt lonely and left out.  She was alone all night, no more shoving my pillow aside to give her a place to sleep next to my head.

To give her time with her humans meant to leave the orange boys alone.  Downy would sit in the kitchen watching us through the glass door that kept us all apart.

Graymatter got sick and then sicker.  I was warned, God forgive me, that the tranquilizers I gave her could do that.  I said I was OK with her having a shorter life, if it gave her a happier life.

I'll have to live with that, which would be a little easier if it had helped more, but it did help a little.  I guess it did.  It made her a little calmer.  Then it destroyed her liver.

Through her last 6 weeks, we tried to bring her back.  The liver can regenerate.  We coaxed water and food into her.  She resumed being engaged with life, exploring, demanding a treat-toss game.  But her liver was distended and her body, despite her eating fairly well, all bone.

On her last afternoon. The others knew she was very ill and did not bother her as she walked the garden, resting often.

Larry found every egress from the back garden through which she could escape or be injured, covered them all with chicken wire, and she got two afternoons outside.  I followed her.  She roamed and roamed, smelled everything, explored everything.  The second day, she did less, but flopped to rest often and then hiked herself back up and kept going.  That night, at 2:30 AM, she died.

All through watching Graymatter succumb to heart failure, I could comfort myself with life being better for Downy now.  The whole house open, his flopping places accessible again, evenings with us humans.

And he vanished.

He and Scooter went out to the back yard, as always, at about 5 AM, and Downy was not seen again for two weeks.  13 horrible days of my imagining coyotes, snakes, kidnapers for animal-fight rings.

I barely mourned my little girl, worrying if her brother was scared, hurting, being abused.  His return seemed so miraculous, and the relief of not having to deal with her foul behavior so immense, I can't pretend to have given her the grieving she deserves.  This is where I stop trolling for comfort, and reveal that I'm a piece of crap.  It's over.  I didn't help her, maybe I couldn't, maybe sitting with her that awful last night was all I could do, maybe not, past, done and over with.  I don't want to think about it any more.

But I do.  I miss the dear, funny good times.  They hit me at odd moments, but I never forget how many years in the past they were, as things deteriorated.

"Lost pet" flyers WORK, folks.
Use them!
Use EVERY RESOURCE, mass mailings, social media, everything, but do put up flyers!!

We're done with the house.  It goes on the market when we can get it ready.  We have my parents' house and we're back to our old neighborhood, some renovations done, others scheduled.  It seems like a better thing.  But I've lost faith in trying to do anything right.  We tried it with buying that house.  That Right Thing was Wronger than I ever dreamed.

Back on the marsh, things are good.  There will be no more outdoor roaming for either cat.  Both Orange Guys spend almost all day on the screened porch, and seem to find it acceptable.

Downy especially.

Extra! 1000s More of Her Emails Released!

Graymatter, 2001-2016

Those who have followed our cat life over the past decade should know that we've lost Graymatter.

May 12th.  And this is it for now.  It was all tied up in other things that were going on and I will be back to tell about it, but I can't yet.  The rest of us are ok but it was a very hard month.  Farewell to my dear troubled girl.

Rain

Since nobody reads blogs anymore, especially when they're kept up as seldom as this one has been, I guess I can just thought-stream about strange things.

It dawned on me the other day how much raw feeling humanity has had for rain; joy, fear, despair.  Just how much sheer time humanity has spent thinking about rain.

Early human communities worshipped the sun, knowing it was life-giving, but I think we worried about it less than we did about rain.  Food depended on both, but the sun was more predictable.  Rain, rain, too much, too little, too early, too late.  One crop flourishes, one withers, under the same timing and amount of rainfall.





Floods.   Parched earth.   Floods followed by parching.  Praying and begging for less rain.  Praying and begging for more.  Finding yourself watching a deluge with cold fear, and then a few months later, day after day of dryness, wishing and hoping for rain.  Give us life, don't take life away from us.  What can we do to bring the rain?  To stop the rain?  Prayers and cloud-seeding and human sacrifice to a god who seems angry enough to withhold rain.

It's used as a metaphor for scary, for stressful, for Bad days.  Rainy days, versus sunny days.

         Don't sorrow for sunshine, learn to dance in the rain!

Sunshine seems benevolent, its dangers known but controllable.  Its apparent less danger is only a seeming, but it seems more passive.  It's just There, whether clouds mask it or not.  Droughts are not thought of as its presence, they are the absence of the clouds and the rain.  The sun gets less blame.   Or God gets less blame for too much sun, than he gets for too little rain.  

Rain gives life, but it's capricious, scary, its ability to kill as obvious, and as unpredictable, as its healing and life-giving powers.

But both of them, the sun and the rain, give both.

 

A delightfully mundane Christmas Eve

There's been a huge amount of work to do, back at the house we moved out of, where I've finally had time to sort through 12 years of stored stuff left in the basement, including the stock from our 2005 real walk-in store.  And a lot to do at my parents' house that's now ours and getting some serious repairs and renovation. So for a couple months, I have hardly had time or energy for mundane tasks at home, except on odd days.  The Spouse has microwaved an awful lot of Mac'n'Cheese.

This December 24th, I am home, unstressed (because tomorrow's dinner was ordered ready for the oven, and you BET that's wonderful), and puttering around.  I've laundered grubby potholders.   I've seasoned some old cast iron pans.

I know they still don't look great but that was some serious steel-wool scrubbing - and I'm OK with the rough look!

One daughter is here from Up North, and we all braved the shopper crush at Kmart and I got a new vacuum cleaner bags and a nice sweater for 10.99(!). Came home and unclogged the vacuum cleaner of its impacted cat hair.  I cleaned the mat under the dish drainer.

The only Christmas-y thing I've done today was to put my grandmother's near-hundred-year-old star on top of the tree.

But earlier in the week, I did clean and paint an old metal Santa sleigh left behind in the garden shed by the house's previous owner.  Wrapped some small gift boxes for it to hold.  Crocheted little mufflers for the reindeer we got a couple weeks ago at our local nursery/garden center.  See how Martha Stewartish I can be?  OK, notsomuch.  The mufflers are just 2 quick crochet rows with a border, 30 minutes or so.  If I were Stewartizing, I wouldn't get Christmas dinner delivered!

So!  This is just my annual Merry Christmas, joyous holiday post.  Be well, have peace, and may this turn of the year bring good things to any and all who are reading this!