Swimming Against the Tirade, Part One: Wading In

I'll warn you right from the start: This may not make any sense, go anywhere, come to any conclusions, or even make a single point. And why? Because I'm choosing to share contemplations prior to their being synthesized into any useful form. I only do that out of a need to find an answer--or several--to my query. Maybe you can help...

Last night I attended a community meeting to discuss a town pool. We've never had one, wanted one for decades, and every attempt to make this item on the wish list come to fruition has either met with financial or political death. I've met on other occasions with this current "group of dreamers" and have found them to be extremely professional and entirely prepared to make our wet dream into reality. They've spend the better part of two years doing surveys, drawing up plans, getting estimates, doing studies--they even got the acreage donated for $10. Then they decided to unveil their work.

I'll hazard the guess that there were maybe 100 people on hand for their Power Point presentation, perhaps a little less, but in a town of less than 10,000, that pretty much constitutes a quorum. And we'd hardly gotten underway until the creeping bad feeling set in: the one that in "pool ideas past" had led to taking sides and rending of relationships. A guy interrupted and demanded the board introduce themselves--they had a slide coming with all that info on it but that wouldn't do for the man in the back row who "wanted to know he was talking to". I gave him a dirty look, I couldn't help it. I felt he was being rude.

Not too many slides later, some among us decided that the Q&A wouldn't wait until after the presentation but would take place in a piecemeal fashion, or what devolved into stream-of-thought-consciousness. Nice for an essay, shitty for a serious forum. Even the newly-elected Mayor--picture a Western Chris Christie--had to interrupt and throw his no-amplification-required voice around. And he was nice. He made sense. I decided to give the crowd a chance at redemption. (He turned on them later in the meeting, of course.)

I believe I counted to five or six the number of times the man across the aisle from me murmured "Bullshit!" in the following minutes. He was indirectly addressing an engineer (also a City Council Member) who was detailing the findings of untold hours of investigation he'd done on his own time. He gave lots of facts and figures and presented them in a way that I found quite meaningful and accessible. But the man seated a mere two feet from me had an obvious problem with the speaker. And it came out, as the engineer moved closer to the audience in order to take a question from the rear: "I was in the DOD longer than you and that's bullshit!" my seatmate announced, not in a shout, but loudly enough that most of those gathered could hear him. The engineer paused just a beat, and in that beat, without thinking or planning, I looked over at the man and said, "What is your PROBLEM?" We both realized at the same moment that I'd actually said that aloud, but nothing happened. He never looked at me, never recognized my presence. He was not as much of a problem after my intervention as he had been prior to it, however. (Just like every time I've bothered to correct a RWNJ on Twitter, kindly of course, they just disappear.)

Several other comments/complaints/sarcastic remarks were suffered by the folks at the front of the room over the course of the ninety minute meeting, and they remained gracious to a man/woman. I wish I could've said the same of the invited audience. If I had to estimate, I'd say that somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the city dwellers were with the board, but it was the squawky wheels running the show. By the time the meeting drew to a close, it seemed that everyone in the room was against the people and the project. I realize that was just perception and likely not the case, but those of us who were mostly silent were suffering from shock at our neighbors' reactions and treatment of these people and sat wishing for an air of civility to blow in off the peaks.

I was proud when a friend I'd invited stood before everyone could leave and asked for the audience to appreciate the work these people had put into a thing WE had long asked for by giving them a round of applause. She shamed 'em into it, and I will have to thank her when next we cross paths.

For my part, I went up to our former County Clerk, now retired and a member of many good works-type boards, and personally apologized for the behavior of some in attendance. "We aren't all like that, I just wanted you to know," I said as I took her hand and thanked her for all those hours of UNPAID work and lobbying on the behalf of the citizenry. I couldn't have left the building without putting a reasonable bit of punctuation on the unsavory evening, after all.

So what are these horns upon which I find myself, wrestling with a dilemma? They seem to be elk or deer horns, and I fear I'm looking at an eight- or ten-point buck:

*Where is it appropriate to engage in activism?
*Do I really want to know the inner-workings of small town politics?
*Should I try to educate or shape minds?
*Should I just practice my path in a way that draws others to me?
*Do I want to fight the local fights in the same way I fight the national ones?
*Do I let myself get disillusioned and walk away?
*Do I even go forward with another community group setting out to do WAY more controversial things in town? (Community gardens are RED, you know. Commies!)

It's the old "more flies with honey than vinegar" adage meets "why bother". I was so fired up with head-shaking anger last night that I didn't dare to write this in that moment. I knew too that I'd gone expecting a nice, hopeful vision of our future which would be met with rose petals and chocolates and instead I got the Iraq invasion. I had to let go of what I wanted to have happen and embrace what actually took place before I could begin to qualify the event in one way or the other. I had that much presence of mind at least.

But I'm not sure what to do with my 24 hours of lucidity, not sure it has brought me any closer to deciding how to proceed. What I do know is that I love this town and the vast majority of its residents. Outside a few bumperstickers and yard signs (and most of those are mine), political feelings tend to stay under the surface. We're more likely to discuss irrigation than immigration in these parts. Roundtables are a place to have dinner. Poles have more use to us than do polls.

I don't want to "come out of the water closet" with all of my Progressive views, but those in my circle and those I meet know where I stand. I do fly my freak flag daily, I just don't go in for one on the scale of the over-sized stars-and-stripes that cast shadows over car dealerships. It's not about me, it's about the message, the idea.

If there's one idea I'd like to get across to the rabble rousers of last evening, it would be that "public" is not bad and "private" is not good. It isn't that simple. I'd hoped when the board president started by asking for a show of hands of those who could swim, then followed that by asking how many of them had learned to swim in a public facility, the point might be made. It wasn't. The environment of this election year has so many misinformed, so many feeding on whatever the Fox trough sets out for slops. (More like Pig News, if you will.)

That's enough to ask you to read for now; I'll likely revisit this in posts to follow in the coming days. There are more stories to tell, but mostly there are decisions to make. I'm not sure this is about the pool for me anymore, as a matter of fact I know it isn't. It's about something much more important.

It's not the hole full of water I want to fight for, it's the hole in our national soul.

The Revolution USED To Be Televised

I grew up a child of the Seventies: Supergroups on the radio and sit-coms on the television. If Aaron Spelling liked it, you liked it too. Bell-bottoms, headbands, afros, peace signs, and flowers adorned everyone--and by everyone, I mean TV was inclusive in those days. For every Archie Bunker, there was a Lionel Jefferson. For every Mr. Grant, there was a Maude. Things evened out in prime time TV America then.

I'd like to think it was because we all got along and whistled "Hi-Ho", arms linked, as we went in to work every Monday morning. When compared with the climate today, that's even believable. But what is a more likely scenario, or at least one we should ponder, is that it made us feel better.

White America could have their JJ, Thelma, and Michael and not feel guilty that the real estate agent promised those folks would never live next door. Men could laugh with Maude, then go into the office and pay the women the same salary year after year while promoting the younger, less experienced men to management positions. The majority had safety in their numbers with a clear path and smooth sailing.

Then came the election of President Obama, and the realization--if they hadn't known it before--that their long-standing paradigm had shifted. Chico was now The Man. George Jefferson could take you to the cleaners if he wanted to. Maude was pissed.

And today's fear-mongers know it. They might as well shout "The world is getting smaller" on the Fox or at least on Glenn Beck's radio show. They can willingly tap into the psyche of the old folks, now down on their health and nearly out of money, and get them to blame the brown people, or the immigrants, or the women, or the youth, or whoever else has taken away their dreams of retirement. (It was the banks and Bain, but whatever.) "Blame the gays!" seems to be the rallying cry from a fair number of North Carolina pulpits these days.

Everyone fears change. Psychiatrists have long held that deaths and dissolutions of relationships are the most stressful events we encounter. Change can suck, but it doesn't have to. (Those of you who are parents know what I mean.)

I say if we went back to the days when Archie could spew his hate to a laugh track, we'd be better off--his insanity would be in context, with the paranoia obvious. (It wouldn't pass for "news" like it does these days.) And, as President just taught us by supporting Marriage Equality, everyone needs a good example.

Let's put some good and bad examples on the sits-coms again. Let's stop being PC and playing it safe--look at all those old, white men in Congress, you call that safe? We embraced many types of characters back then--stereotypically in some instances, and I wouldn't want that--think The Cosby Show rather than Good Times. Think George Lopes rather than Chico and the Man. And since we've jumped ahead to the Eighties and Nineties with the analogy, think Barney Miller if you like, but Reno 9-1-1 is still hilarious.

The revolution happens when we talk together, laugh and cry together--not when we pretend each other doesn't exist. I wouldn't want somebody to think that because I was raised in the South, I'm a caricature from "Carter Country"; I'd want them to get to know me, then together we could laugh at the show if we chose to. Because I work from home I wouldn't choose to be taken for June Cleaver, but I also don't mind making a pie whenever asked. We're all so much more complicated, so much more interesting than our single, publicly-displayed dimension.

TV can do that. TV is a magic box of wonder that can do anything! The prophet Tom Snyder called it a "colortini" which swirled images around for our amusement.

I hope the revolution gets televised again. I'll get my martini glass ready just in case. Then I'll be at the ready with, "I'll have what Snyder's having!"

They Don't Make Elephants Like Eisenhower Anymore

I've been gone for a while, off slaying various dragons--ending the school year, attempting to best an upper respiratory infection and the accompanying fever, and errant gardening here and there--and though I've battled with this particular serpent in past posts, I believe he still lies coiled and strong, waiting to reign over us with fire and, dare I say it, ennui.

And while he has committed many crimes against us, the first with which I'd like to dispatch is the sin of thievery as he has stolen four of the kingdom's sacred symbols: The American Flag, plus signs, tea, and the letter W. I'd like these to be wrested from their foul perches in your lair, oh evil one, and returned to the union of people post-haste. (And those of us who were great fans of "Northern Exposure" would like Janine Turner back, as well.)

And then there's the lying. But here we run smack into a thicket of burning Bushes because it seems that while it is A-OK to lie about WMD to "create jobs" and put Halliburton to work building things, it is foolish, naive, and downright unAmerican to suggest that we ask scientists to declare an imminent alien invasion so we could build high-speed rail and other necessities of infrastructure in order to put people back to work. (Paul Krugman doesn't even kill anyone with his little subterfuge.)

Cheating? Well now we've really gotten into the weeds. You see cheating doesn't seem to have a meaning anymore, or at least not one definition which applies to everyone. For example, let's say you're an immigrant kid who came to this country by whatever means and for whatever reasons, got an education or served in the military, and now you just want to be a citizen. (Sounds like you've already been one.) You sir or ma'am are a cheater! You just want to leech off of our "free economy"--that's the new, nicer name for the "free market" in case you haven't noticed--so you can have your little "Dream Act". You should look to our giants of industry like Eduardo Saverin, one of Facebook's co-founders, who came to this country for his safety and left for his money's safety. (Fifteen percent of a fortune is still a fortune after all.)

Of course the worst kind of cheating is when you cheat by lying AND stealing which I believe is also called the "free economy", that is if the labor is free and the economy is held by only those who know what to do with what we earned. We are, after all, paying THEM all our monies to tell us how to live: Here's my pension, my monthly budget, my contraceptive plan, now judge me please. It's a modern-day "company store" where the migrant immigrants are trapped in slavery, indentured servitude at best. And you don't have to change a lot of letters to go from Confederate to Corporate. The Man who wants to be in the Big House puts it this way:

*Cliques are cool but unions are bad
*It's only worth what someone will give you for it
*Do as much as you can with as little as possible, then splurge with the profits
*The winners are mine, the losers are yours
*Investment is a wonderful thing unless the government's doing it

In short, they just don't make elephants like Eisenhower anymore. Remember that old interstate highway system scheme? How'd that work out for us? Then there was that radical socialist Lincoln with his transcontinental railroad. What a tool! Today's Republicans won't fall for those follies, no, they will give us our "trans" right where we need it. In our hoo-hoos! Transvaginal probes for the lot of you!

And the rabble did rouse. Why? They figured something out: We don't need THEM, they need US. They cannot run their factories without us. They cannot get to work on time without us. They cannot clothe their bodies without us. They cannot take a poo without the toilets we made and the water mains we built and the sewage treatment plants we installed. Without the 99%, the 1% would not only be full of it, they'd be covered in it. And we need to remember to remind them of that. (They do need a lot of reminding of course, poor things think 60 is a simple majority.)

So don't let the Greedy Dragon get you down. No matter who or where you are, you can do something to make a difference. You can talk to your neighbors, you can talk to the school board, and if you're like me, you can talk to the cans in the grocery store aisle. (You can do it with the cell phone to your head if you're insanity-shy.) You can go to meetings and gatherings of like-minded or not like-minded people. You can sign online petitions. You can email your representatives at all levels. You can act up or act out or act sweet--just act.

I wonder what Maggie O'Connell would've done had her hostess not been taken over by the dark side? Here she was, a strong single gal in a backwater Alaska town founded by two lesbians and full of free-spirited people. I know what she would've done back in the day, but now that she's gone all right-wing and Fox-y--I suppose she'd just pull a K Street "The Family"-style apology by whipping out the old Jesus Etch-a-Sketch: "Oops"--as Ricky P said--that never happened, I'm forgiven, look there's Elvis! And like that, it's gone.

Poor Maggie, I guess she's trying to fit into the current craze and be relevant again. Heck, Sugar, you didn't need to go on the TV or put out your Jesus Yoga video, you were needed already what with all that transvaginal probing to be done. She was a bush pilot, you know.