America, we can be better than this

Roland and his mom, Myra Gregory. from The Takeaway.

16% of US children live in poverty. That may shock you as you begin to compute the millions of children that percentage represents. Keep in mind this: this percentage represents a ten percent decrease largely created during President Bush's tenure and President Obama’s tenure. Why the decrease?  What happened?

Government happened.

Government policies and practices helped to lower the percentage of children living in poverty. The market and trickle down economies did not help to lower the percentages of children living in poverty. Government helped. 

Presidents Bush and Obama are of course, gone from office. So too are responsible and ethical budgeting. In an article from The Huffington Post,  Alon Ben-Meir, a Senior Fellow Center for Global Affairs at NYU wrote (Oct. 27, 2017):

"Here is the glaring cruelty of Trump’s budget cuts. Over the next 10 years, $190 billion is being cut from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), and $616 billion cut from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). In addition, the cut from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (welfare) is $21.6 billion. There is a proposed cut of $40.4 billion from earned-income tax credits and child tax credits."

The very programs that helped to lower the poverty level are being drastically reduced by the GOP and Trump. Instead of ensuring children have health care and food, we are building a wall that is not needed, nor will it be effective. Consider this:

"In each year from 2007 to 2014, more people joined the ranks of the illegal by remaining in the United States after their temporary visitor permits expired than by creeping across the Mexican border, according to a report by researchers at the Center for Migration Studies." (from NYT, 3.6.17)

Trump's deluge of tweets suggests that market gains represent the best indicator of what makes America great. This isn’t too surprising given his wealth and the insulation that such wealth often presents. For him and other 1%ers the stock market is a fine and accurate measure of success. CNN Money (2017) reports that "88% of those making more than $1 million are in the market, which explains why the rising stock market tracks with increasing levels of inequality" (from here). Consider that "On average across the United States, only 18.7% of taxpayers directly own stocks." For average Americans and certainly for Americans who suffer from poverty, the stock market is at best an indicator of the increasing divide between the wealthy and everyone else. The stock market gains that Trump boasts benefits the richest Americans, like him. 

There’s something rather amoral about budgeting decision of the Trump administration and the GOP in Washington. 

They have cut government to better ensure their own financial gains and to forward their social values. 

 

At the beginning of January (2018) Pence and his wife hosted "faith leaders." For these people, abortion is considered evil.  I wonder though where their outrage is for actual living children--those no longer in the womb? Where is their fight for those 9 million children whose health care is not being funded (CHIPS).  A month ago I heard a story on The Takeaway about a mom (Myra Gregory) and her little ten-year son, Roland, who has stage IV lung cancer. Because Congress has not funded the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), her boy has had no scans since last summer and his very necessary pain meds are no longer guaranteed. He’s fighting what my husband died from at 60. Rob said the pain from the tumors on his spine was like an ice pick being driven into his back over and over. Imagine that kind of pain  being felt by a child? Pain that could be managed if Congress could find CHIPs.   

The stock market will never be my measure of economic success in America. A better measure of economic success is when Roland and all other child are well fed, have steady places to live, and have access to health care that rivals Congress. 

Come on, America—we can do better than this. 

#SOL18: Trump’s ‘shithole countries’ Comment Reveals the Racist

Crossing Brooklyn Bridge (M.A. Reilly, 1.10.18)

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met yesterday. (From: The Washington Post, 1.11.18) 

Yesterday  I worked at MS 88 in Brooklyn all day. It’s an amazing middle school and when I was leaving about 6 pm, the halls were still filled with students. It’s a school where the energy of learning is so prominent. I caught a ride to Penn Station from a local car service (thanks Ailene) and enjoyed an hour long conversation with Muhammed, who hails from the west coast of Africa, from the country of Gambia.

“It is the smallest country in Africa,” Muhammed told me. “A most beautiful country.  Our coast is so lovely. Few here seem to know of it.”

“I would like to visit,” I told him.

“You must.”

Our conversation eventually focused on learning and I told him a bit about my day at MS 88: the inspiring teachers and principal, the dynamic young people, and the joy of learning.

“I have the best job,” I said laughing. “I get paid to work and learn with other people. I swear I learn far more from them than I suspect they learn me. It really is a privilege.” 

“Your words. They inspire me,” Muhammed said. “I have been thinking about what I want to do. Your stories give me ideas.” 

“Like what?” 

“It is hard to say.” 

“What are you considering?”

“In two years I want to return to my country. I will work with young people like you do here. I too would like to teach.” 

“It is such satisfying work.” 

“I will work hard to be able to do it. This gives me purpose.” 

“Working with others makes me happy. But I think you’ll see that working alongside children is the best.”  

“Yes, I think so too.”

This morning I thought of Muhammed when I read The Washington Post article that recounted Trump’s course language while revealing his racist dogma. Imagine a president who speaking publicly refers to other countries as shitholes where the dominant race is African while suggesting we allow more Norwegians, where the dominant race is white, to immigrate?  I thought Muhammed is a man Trump will never know and frankly we are all the worse for it.

How very sad and tiresome it is to toil beneath the weight of this old, angry white guy who a minority of voters elected. How stuck we are. It is also frightening when I consider that this very unstable imbecile is one of the most powerful people on the planet. His small, little bubble of like-minded white men denies him access to other. Without encounters with other, we are likely doomed to repeat mistakes and to think our current reality represents the whole of the world. 

At the very least we ought to demand a president who is (other)wise. 

#SOL17: Kneel Down

"We Have Chosen Hope Over Fear" (Reilly, 2012)

I. 

The day after Barack Obama won the presidency in November 2008, Rob, Devon, and I were eating dinner at a local diner when I looked up at an image of the newly elected President on a FOX News telecast and snapped a photo.  At the time I wasn't sure what I planned to do, but I knew I wanted to work the image into a collage. As I worked our flag began to emerge alongside images of children and young people I had taught across many years. Like so many others, I too felt strongly that "we had chosen hope over fear." The flag symbolized that hope. I remember Rob and I believing that our flag was a beacon that called attention to what was possible. Thomas Paine in Common Sense wrote, "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right" (p. 25). It was time, well past time, to set right what was and remained so very wrong. Not all  were treated equally, justly, equitably. As white parents to a child of color, we took hope that night that given the vote, other white people in this country finally understood that healing racial injustice was the most important step forward we could make as a country.  If we failed to do this, we placed in peril these United States. 

And now, nearly a decade later, that peril feels palpable. We are a long way from that night when a young Barack Obama and so many of us felt proud, and believed that perhaps America was ready, interested, and committed to heal our racial injustice.  That hope has grown dim these last few years. Now, we are led by a man, who at the very least, is highly sympathetic with white nationalists, who bates Americans to hate other Americans on a weekly basis, and who behaves as the bully of the country.  Our president, Donald Trump does not act like a man who loves America. Loving America and its people is the foundation upon which all other presidential responsibilities rest.

II.

The national anthem and the US flag represent many ideals for citizens, ideals that some have even died for and these beliefs aren't singular, nor are they owned. What America means has never been a simple or singular belief, nor should it. Democracies are far more complex. 

Being a patriot ought to involve some self-sacrifice and that's what the young quarterback at that time playing for San Francisco did. Sacrifice. Colin Kaepernick knelt in protest when the national anthem played. He explained, "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color." In kneeling down, he stood up and did so at potential personal harm. Unsigned, the talent remains in the wings this season as President Trump rallies his mostly white, Southern audiences by calling black athletes, like Kaepernick who kneel when the anthem is played sons of bitches.

Last week President Trump went to Alabama and said this to a crowd of followers:

Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired!’ You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s gonna say, ‘That guy disrespects our flag, he’s fired.’ And that owner, they don’t know it. They don’t know it. They’re friends of mine, many of them. They don’t know it. They’ll be the most popular person, for a week. They’ll be the most popular person in the country.

Imagine, an old, white rich guy bating a hoard of white people at a "rally" by saying that his NFL team-owner friends (other mega-wealthy men) could be the most popular people in the country by firing black athletes for exercising the very rights that flag symbolizes.  Now consider that the man spewing such hate is the man elected to protect our basic ideals and frankly the only thing I am left wondering is why aren't we all kneeling down?  

SOL17: Karolina's Twins, The Nazis, and Trump

Memory is the Diary We All Carry (M.A. Reilly, 2017)

I.

Since I finished reading Ronald Balson's novel Karolina's Twins, my sleep has been disturbed.  I'm not sure I would have finished the novel had it not been the next book my book group is discussing. But I did finish it and for the next week, I woke from nightmares very early each morning recalling the sounds of trains, the cries of babies, the hard leather of a boot pressed against my neck.

The novel is set in Poland during Nazi occupation and tells the story of Lena, a 89-year-old Jewish woman who at the time of the Holocaust was a teenager. The atrocities described cut me and surely fueled the nightmares. While asleep, I have been replaying some of the cruelties Lena, the main character faced. This is not the first or only Holocaust-related book I have read. Yet, it hurt more than any other. I'm not sure if it is because I am a mom and relate to the immense loss mothers must have experienced at the hands of the Nazis--losses I can not set down. Or perhaps it was that my husband who was Jewish and is now dead calls forth for me all those cowards who watched the Nazis slaughter innocent lives. There were thousands and thousands of people who killed men just like Rob and would have done so at any point in his life.  They would have murdered him as an infant, a young boy, a teen, a man--and millions more would have turned a blind eye and allowed it to happen.  The question of who we are, wakes me from sleep.

Lena and Karolina know that at the end of the train ride to Gross-Rosen, their two baby girls will be murdered. Of this there is no question. When Lena describes how she and her friend Karolina each throw an infant girl from a moving train in an effort to perhaps save their lives, I felt the very weight of my own son the first time I held him against my chest.  I felt this in 2017 as I sat in a chair in my home. I could feel the solidness of his small body. The smell of him. The way he fit just perfectly against me. All of this felt imprinted. Lena knows their only hope is to leave them for chance: Will they survive the fall?  Will someone find them in time?  Will someone care for them? Will they be turned over to the Nazis anyway?

And I wondered would I have ever had the courage to throw my son that solid living body and beautiful boy, out a train window in order to perhaps save him from the certain death he would know by Nazis.


II.

Old Man Watching (M.A. Reilly, 2017)

I'm not sure the nightmares would have come had murdered infants been all I was thinking about. From the start of the novel, I was disturbed by the wishful thinking Lena and her family engaged in when the German occupation was new. It felt too familiar. It felt like how I have been living here in the United States since Donald Trump was elected and began to staff the White House with Nazis.

Early in the novel, Lena explains the beginning of Nazi occupation,

“New rules came down every day and more restrictions were imposed. Still, we survived. We adapted. We would wait it out. We held tight to the belief that soon the world would crush the Germans and they would leave" (p. 25).

Lena's dismissal of the horror, the adaptations they made, had me wondering about home.


III.

I imagine, like me, you know where you were when you first heard about the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, VA this last weekend and the violence they caused. I was walking out of the MET, having just finished a drawing class and as soon as I heard the location, I immediately thought of a friend  who lives there.  When I got home, I sent her a message asking if she and her family were okay and was relieved to learn quickly they were safe.

Then the death of Heather Hayer was reported, a 32-year-old woman who while protesting the Nazis, was murdered by a 20-year-old kid from Ohio who drove his car into a crowd, reminiscent of the Nice, France terrorist act a year ago. This young Nazi killed Heather and injured 19 others. He did so with determination.

As expected, the US president, Donald Trump, spoke to the country.  In moments of terrorism, leadership matters. He said this:

We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. 

I thought my head might explode when I heard him say and then repeat, "on many sides" as he gestured with his hands as if he could dismiss the whole matter like one calling for a bill at the end of a meal.

What sides?

A young woman was dead because a Nazi killed her on a street in America.  With his words and then silence, Trump signaled his support for the violent Nazis in our country.  Make no mistake, Trump invited them into our homes. His language was clear.  There was no ambiguity.

The very people who elected him as president were supported by the president. And they said so.

Andrew Anglin, the cretor of the Nazi site The Daily Stormer, praised Trump's response. "He didn't attack us,"he wrote in a blog post on the site. "[He] implied that there was hate...on both sides. So he implied the antifa are haters. There was virtually no counter-signaling of us all." (from here).

It's 2017 and the Nazis are here.


IV.


Faced with increasing criticism from his own party, the media, and the public, Trump still took days to make a new statement. He showed us all who he really is by his comment on Saturday and his silence on Sunday. He's his father's son. Fred was arrested in his youth at a KKK rally. Like father like son.

And now Donald Trump has invited the Nazis to come out from under the rocks and slime and parade down Main Street, full of swagger and spitting hate, and designing murder. He has invited white supremacists into the White House. They dine with him. They fly alongside him on Air Force One. They advise him.

Make no mistake, we should not adapt to this, turn the other eye, wish for better days, hope this maniac settles.

Empowering hate is what Donald Trump does most consistently and most well.  He is divisive, mistaken, and unable to function as president. He and Vice President Pence must be removed from office because they harm us.

Their choices harm us. Their allegiances harm us. Their overt support of white supremacists harm us.

Impeach Trump and Pence, now.

#SOL16: Bear Hunting, Donald Trump, Chinatown, and Becoming (Other)Wise

Storm Warning (2012)

When the chesty, fierce-furred bear becomes sick he travels the mountainsides and the fields, searching for certain grasses, flowers, leaves and herbs, that hold within themselves the power of healing. He eats, he grows stronger. Could you, oh clever one, do this? Do you know anything about where you live, what it offers? Have you ever said, “Sir Bear, teach me. I am a customer of death coming, and would give you a pot of honey and my house on the western hills to know what you know.” - Mary Oliver, Upstream, p. 7.

I.

from here: http://www.state.nj.us/dep/fgw/bearseason_info.htm

In New Jersey yesterday, 206 bears were killed on the first day of bear hunting season. 206 black bears shot dead by arrows. The first bear killed this year was a 104-pound female. 74 of those 206 bears were killed nearby my home, in ZONE 3 of the bear 'harvesting' map. A prodigious day apparently. Beginning on Thursday through Saturday, eager hunters can kill bear with bow and arrows and guns (muzzleloaders).

I share woods with bears; my home situated between multiple state forests in northern New Jersey. We moved here nearly 15 years ago to be close enough to Manhattan and to still live where trees aren't something that simply line streets. I walk in the woods (not this week) a good portion of the time unless hunting is happening. Sometimes, especially in early spring, bears wander from the woods and can be seen lumbering across gravel roads and asphalt; across newly greening lawns. People come to ZONE 3 to kayak, hike and run trails, ride bikes, walk in the woods, and apparently now to use bows and arrows and guns to kill black bears.

II.

Death is so final, so absolute. There is no going back, There is no do over.  Losing my husband, seeing Rob die last March taught me that. Once dead, you remain dead. The 104-pound bear is as dead today as she was yesterday afternoon. And we are the worse for that. Perhaps my sensibilities about death are heightened given the last 15 months, but when I read about the bear killing it gutted me. When I read about the 'bear problem' in New Jersey, I thought how very foolish we are. And so it was with this on my mind that I started to read Mary Oliver's new essay collection, Upstream. I stopped two pages in when I came across the paragraph at the top of this post. It offers such a sharp contrast to killing bears--a contrast worth our notice.

Oliver situates a bear as knowing differently than us. Bears know stuff we don't.  She asks, "Have you ever said, 'Sir Bear, teach me. I am a customer of death coming, and would give you a pot of honey and my house on the western hills to know what you know.'" 

Have you?  Have I? What might we learn if we had the courage to do so?

III.

Maxine Greene wrote about the need to become otherwise.  Becoming otherwise is to consider points of view that feel foreign, not as some exotic exercise, but rather as a way of being in the world. Rather than judge it wrong--there is an interest in understanding, in not naming too quickly, too singularly. I think of this stance--this way of living in light of the presidential election that seems to have gone on for more than a epoch. Has there been in recent memory another election that has so divided a country?  That has set us against one another?  That we are more  nation of us and them, than we the people?

How do we mend what we have torn apart?  How do we gather up the courage to become wise about others who are not us? How do we resist harming more?

IV.

You may have read about the recent O'Reilly Factor debacle that found correspondent Jesse Watters loose in Chinatown (NYC). He was sent there by the show's host, Bill O'Reilly because "China" has been so often mentioned during the election.  In what has been defined as vile and racist by NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, Watters conducted pseudo-interviews on the street. Interspersed among the interviews were video of Watters "getting a foot massage, playing with nunchucks and asking loaded questions that some residents appeared not to understand or couldn’t answer." (from here).  Watching the segment left me disheartened, my stomach clenched, and stench of fear and anger.  This was a stab at humor? How is this even possible in 2016?

I have been thinking about this a lot. Thinking about the country my 17-year-old Korean son will be claiming for in a few brief months as he sets out from home to go to college. What world will this young man find?  How safe will he be?  How loved? Misunderstood? Demeaned? How dare Watters and O'Reilly determine my son's worth by their narrow white privilege. How dare them.  And how dare anyone who laughs alongside this 'news' show.

We must demand more of ourselves and say loudly NO to such depictions of others/selves.

V.

And perhaps this demanding more our ourselves is at the center of what we must do regardless of the election outcome.  We cannot delay such actions.  To make a kinder, better, brighter and more humane life in this country, we need to cozy-up to other. Learn to love what we don't like.

That means all of us, although I need not wait for you to start.

I'm taking an inventory of what is other in my life.  At the top of the list are Trump and his supporters. I don't understand the motivation to support this candidate, but that doesn't mean that I need to hate him or his supporters--for I don't know even one of them.  It's easy to dislike a group--easy as it is foolish. It's far harder to dislike a person with whom you share a story. I know I don't need to be perfect at this embrace of other, I just need to do it.

VI.

Oliver closes the essay by reminding us that "[a]ttention is the beginning of devotion" (p. 8).  How observant she is. How wise.

And so tonight I am praying that I might practice noticing and learn how to resist the too easy naming that blinds me.  Let me take notice of what is in front of me--be it the bear in nearby woods, the voter I don't understand, the candidate I can't seem to respect.  Let me pay attention so I may better love.

Sir/Madam, teach me. I am a customer of death coming.