The World is Still Turning for Many

I keep seeing people talk about how the world has come to a standstill. For many of us, that's true. Time seems to pass differently. A lot of distractions have been removed. Many of us are more isolated than we've ever been. Others are enjoying--or not--more family time than they've had in years.

In some ways, it is undoubtedly good for us. Science is already showing us that it's good for the planet.

 But in our peaceful bubbles, it's important to remember that the world hasn't actually stopped. Of course, we all know that healthcare workers, police, EMTs, firefighters and others who are fighting to keep us safe and healthy during this crisis are working harder than ever, under more difficult, challenging, and discouraging conditions. Most of us are even aware that grocery store employees and others who must deal with the public to get necessary supplies to us are hustling like crazy (and for very little money in most cases). Many of them are also frightened. They've started to die. Take a moment to really let that sink in: grocery store cashier is now a job you risk your life to perform.

But, that's not what I came here to talk about.

I think everyone has the front-line workers on their radar.

Here's what I'm afraid is slipping through the cracks: more than 48,000,000 U.S. workers have been designated essential. Fewer than half of those are healthcare workers and first responders. The others are food manufacturers, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, postal workers, social workers, utility repairmen and others who have probably never crossed your mind.

That's nearly 15% of the U.S. population still out there going to work as usual, laboring alongside the same people they did before, balancing work with housecleaning and laundry and the increasingly-difficult process of obtaining groceries. And that's without considering the many workers in states that haven't limited commerce to essential services.

Of course, the U.S. population includes many who weren't working before the shutdowns. Those 48,000,000 workers represent nearly 20% of the adult population, and more than 30% of the pre-pandemic workforce.

That's nearly 1/3 of Americans who, at best, are going about their day-to-day responsibilities as usual. They get up to alarm clocks in the morning, commute to their jobs, work, worry about having time to finish whatever they need to get done at home...business as usual. Except, their health is at risk in a way it wasn't before. Except, it's harder for them to get groceries and other essentials in the limited time they have available. Except, they can't unwind by having a drink with a friend at the end of a 10-hour shift or take care of themselves by hitting the gym.

There's been a lot of talk about the psychological effects of this pandemic--the isolation, the fears, the realization that our government is either ill-equipped to save us or uninterested in doing so. Those concerns are real.

There's also been a lot of talk about the benefits--the slowing down, the getting back in touch with ourselves and silence, the shifting of priorities. Those are real, too.

But, all of that discussion, pro and con, seems to revolve around those of us whose world has changed dramatically over the past 60 days. What impact will this time have on those who didn't have the luxury of sheltering at home? How are their world views changing, as they experience this pandemic very differently from the rest of us, and how will we reintegrate when life is slated to return to "normal" and these two slices of society have developed very different ideas about what that means?

It’s 10:00. Do You Know Whether Your Child is Being Victimized by a Sex Cult?

Last week, Keith Raniere—former head of NXIVM—was convicted of a battery of charges, including human trafficking, forced labor, and sexual exploitation of a child. You may have seen stories of how vulnerable women were invited into his “self help” organization by other women, enticed to sign non-disclosure agreements and sign up for expensive courses, then groomed for sexual slavery, branded, and ultimately compelled to bring in new victims. If you’ve read or heard any of the details, you were likely horrified. And yet, this is surely a freak occurrence, right? And Raniere has been arrested and convicted. He may even spend the rest of his life in prison. You might be tempted to believe the system works.

What you may not know is that getting to this point was a long and painful process, in large part because Raniere obtained “consent” from his victims. But, Raniere targeted women who had some status and connections. Smallville actress Allison Mack was his chief slave, responsible for the recruitment and management of many others. And, India Oxenberg, daughter of former Dynasty star and Yugoslavian princess Catherine Oxenberg, was among his victims. In other words, at least some of his victims were loved and supported by people with money, a degree of power, and a public platform.

Still, the journey to shutting Raniere down included a string of heartbreaking defeats. Oxenberg has written an excellent book about her struggle to liberate her daughter—branded and restricted to a 500-calorie-per-day diet—from Raniere’s clutches.

Imagine what would have happened if Raniere’s victims had been powerless, and lacking in the kind of support network many NXIVM slaves had.

But wait. We don’t have to.

Because as I write this post, about 30 young women have come forward to make very similar allegations against Wil Francis, formerly of the band Aiden, and also known as William Control. The photos some have shared are enough to make this mother of young women vomit, and their stories and text conversations with Francis are heartbreaking. But, in one way, Francis was smarter—or, perhaps, just less ambitious—than Raniere. His victims don’t have powerful parents or hefty television series salaries. They don’t even have credibility, because they appear to have been carefully selected for their weaknesses—mainly, mental illness and drug addiction.

They’ve banded together. They’ve been to the police. And, although law enforcement knows that Francis and his attorney submitted at least one piece of fabricated evidence to them, the response boils down to, “But you consented.”

Never mind that some of these women say they were involuntarily drugged before they “consented.” Never mind that they were fragile to begin with and systematically groomed, some over a period of years, beginning when they were teens. Never mind that you can’t actually consent to grievous bodily harm.

Nothing we can do. You consented.

Nothing they can do, either, when Francis releases selective texts and videos (often shot without consent) of these young women.

Fans rally around him. His next victims wait in the wings.

How common is this kind of systematic abuse? I don’t know. I know this: this one happened. I know it because although Francis talks about how this was all voluntary, although he claims to be wounded and not understand why all these crazy women are jumping on this bandwagon, I first heard the story of one of his victims years ago, long before NXIVM, long before #MeToo, long before I fully realized how not exactly rare this kind of thing is.

But I’m not writing this tonight because of Keith Raniere’s recent conviction, and I’m not writing it tonight because Wil Francis recently released an expose video of a young woman I’d watched fight tooth and nail for her recovery for years after her encounter with him.

I’m writing it tonight because Ryan Kopf, another man whose profession (as a con organizer and promoter) gives him a touch of charisma and access to a wide range of young women, has been accused of sexual assault by at least 8 women. I know one of them, too—a woman in an entirely different social circle than the other, of a different age, living in a different state. And today, Kopf publicly released recordings of her, just as Wil Francis has been doing to his victims.

I don’t have a neatly packaged solution to offer. The world is messy and unpredictable. It can be hard to know who to believe. But, I will offer a few things I think we should all keep in mind:

1. The most successful predators choose their victims carefully, and the way they treat the strong, healthy people in their lives may be entirely different from the way they treat those they’ve identified as vulnerable (read: the fact that someone has treated you well in no way guarantees that he hasn’t treated someone else horribly)

2. Don’t ignore red flags, no matter how appealing the “opportunity.” Remove yourself from the situation as soon as it starts to feel a little weird. By the time you’re sure it’s not safe, it may be too late to escape.

3. Reserve judgment. I’m not going to go all the way to “Believe women!” Women can lie just like men can lie and children can lie. But, consider the harm. Far too many victims have been publicly attacked by hundreds or thousands of strangers. Even if you doubt her story, there is no reason to risk inflicting deeper, more lasting damage on someone whose world has already become a dangerous place.

4. If you’re concerned about a friend, your daughter, or even a stranger at a concert who seems like she may be in a dangerous situation, ask. Offer help. The worst that can happen if you ask (a rude response, someone thinking you’re intrusive) is a hell of a lot less worse than the worst that can happen if you’re right and say nothing.

5. Consent requires that the person giving it has the mental capacity and freedom to choose. Consent granted under the influence of drugs (especially drugs administered without consent), as the result of blackmail, to avoid physical harm, or because the victim’s mental state has been eroded through sustained abuse and manipulation is not consent. Law enforcement and prosecutors, of course, know this—but those cases are messy and difficult to prove, so it’s easier to say, “There’s nothing we can do.” Hold them accountable.

I still feel like I’m tapering off, like there should be something more solid to offer. If I think of it, I’ll be back. If YOU think of it, please add it in the comments. In the meantime, don’t look away. This is ugly and none of us wants to see it, but bright light is our only real defense.

The Time Machine

The year is 2019. My daughter is 23, and moved out some time ago.

It's mid-morning on a Wednesday and we're sitting at our computers in our respective houses nervously awaiting the magical moment when we'll be able to log on and buy Jonas Brothers concert tickets.

We're nervous about the codes.

Worse, all this time travel/mentioning the year stuff has me thinking about The Year 3000, trying to figure out how to riff off of that in my opening lines, and then realizing no one who reads my blog will know what the hell I'm talking about.

Once upon a time, I spent $353 I could ill afford to buy my daughter Jonas Brothers tickets for her 12th birthday. The show was sold out and I bought e-tickets through a broker, and I was so terrified that they'd turn out to be fake or already scanned or something and she'd be disappointed that I carried $1,000 in cash in my pocket in hopes that I'd be able to scalp replacements if the worst happened.

Once upon a time I spent my lunch hour ironing "I love Nick Jonas" onto a t-shirt one letter at a time because my daughter realized belatedly that she didn't have "appropriate" clothing for the show that night.

Once upon a time I drove across the country searching for free wifi in a McDonald's or rest area so that I could search for a local hotel that had the Disney channel so we didn't miss any of the versions of Camp Rock that aired for the first time that week.

And then, it was later. Mayday Parade, Anarbor and We the Kings in a bar in the south suburbs. All American Rejects at the Metro. Yellowcard at the House of Blues. Vans Warped Tour. Repeat.

And then it was later still. Music I didn't recognize and didn't like blasting from her phone in the car, knocking on her door and getting no answer because the subwoofer drowned me out. She's hitting the road with people I've never met to see The Foo Fighters in another state.

And now, the Jonas Brothers are back.

And I can't talk to you anymore, because tickets go on sale in 20 minutes and I need to obsessively check my payment details and make sure there's no way I can screw this up.

More than I Bargained For

Usually, when people say that something was a bit more than they bargained for, they mean that it turned out to be a bit harder to handle, a bit more overwhelming than they'd expected. That's not what I mean. I mean that I bargained--and bargained hard--for a 10-year-old Honda Civic in decent condition and life gave me a brand new BMW.

More than 10 years ago, I wrote this post about the difficulty of living with "invisible" chronic medical problems. It came up in a conversation tonight and I took a look back at it for the first time in years, and I was shocked. Not by the facts, of course--I know, in an objective, factual sort of way, that I lived in fear of dying or becoming debilitated before my daughter reached adulthood. I know, in that same "story I heard once" sort of way, that I was so limited that she once looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, "You can't just stay like this. You can't even play!" I remember, in words, feeling fortunate to be able to keep earning a living, but knowing that it was slowly killing me. I know that anything beyond necessities seemed ridiculously far out of reach, but that was okay, because I didn't have the energy to want to do anything.

And yet, the picture painted in that old post took me entirely by surprise, because I'd forgotten what it felt like.

I'm 52 now. I've lived long enough to support my daughter into adulthood (though there were some dicey periods) and see her start her own business and nearly complete a very good novel. For years, that was my prime objective, the only think I dared to work toward, hope for, pray for.

I'm 52 now, and I'm not just alive. I didn't just last long enough to complete my mission.

I walked four miles today, and that wasn't an accomplishment--it was a compromise, because it was a busy day. I toyed with going kayaking, but really needed to get some work done. To make up the difference, I dictated some blog posts on my exercise bike. I'm working on two books: a novel and a non-fiction book about an issue that has bothered me for years. Sometimes, I drive to Wisconsin just to write in the library overlooking the lake and then have dinner al fresco across the street from the fountain at the marina. I'm on the board of a local non-profit, and I had forgotten that when I was younger, I couldn't have dreamed of volunteering out in the sun all day.

Of course, this happened slowly, and the path wasn't straight. My daughter grew older and more self-sufficient. I switched to freelancing and found that not setting an alarm clock made a tremendous difference in my health. A different medication keeps my blood pressure under control (most of the time) without causing fatigue and depression. I noticed the landmarks--that I was able to walk further and further, that I rarely woke with my heart pounding in my whole body, that the heat didn't bother me as it once had. I knew I was much better. But somehow, until I re-read that blog post this evening, I didn't know I was not just better, but different--and that my life was not just better, but different.

Most days, I don't think about how I feel.

Most days, I don't hold back from anything because I think it might jeopardize my health.

Most days, I don't notice that I'm not doing those things.

Somewhere along the way, my body (if not my mind) realized that I didn't have to focus on staying alive anymore, and I started to live instead.

The Sun Rises Quietly

Five years ago, after a terrible year that I didn't expect to survive, I waited up to see the sun rise on New Year's Day. But, the sunrise never came that morning. The sky simply faded from darkness to paler and paler gray to light.

There were no bright pink streaks across the sky, no orange ball rising to color the day--it was simply dark and then less dark and then less dark still and then light.  I saw it as a bad omen, then, waiting after a bleak and hopeless year for a sunrise that never came. 

At this point in my life, I rarely wait up for midnight, let alone the sunrise. Last night, contemplating whether I wanted to wait up for the no-longer-literal ball to drop, I realized that watching the sun rise on New Year's Day didn't require staying up all night. So, I tucked into bed at a civilized hour, my bedroom glowing with the soft light from the upstairs Christmas tree and my little dog curled against my hip, and woke up before the sun. 

I pulled my boots on and went outside in my pajamas, waiting patiently in the freezing cold for the arrival of that golden light. And, once again, the world lightened gradually, more like my eyes adjusting than the turning on of a light. Again, the sunrise was devoid of a single splash of color, and I never actually saw the sun. But, that looked a little different to me this time around. It looked like real life. 

Most new beginnings don't look like this.

On New Year's Day 2013, I was looking for a sign, an unmistakable line between the past and the future, something brilliant and hopeful and CLEAR. But, that's not how most of life works. Change comes slowly, gradually, without bugles and splashy colors. We rarely wake up one day in a better world or achieve a single thing or witness a specific event that changes everything that comes after--most of the time, the darkness fades slowly, until you look up and realize suddenly that it's fully daylight.

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Note from a Proud Mom

You all probably already know that I think Tori is pretty impressive, but she outdid herself this week. She got the keys to her first apartment (on fairly short notice) last weekend. She was super-excited about the move, of course, but there was one little glitch: she had some time-sensitive work to finish for her "day job" (yeah, she works for me, but the time pressure was external) and she'd already announced the launch of her new business for October 12.

Somehow, she did it all: finished my work, got her apartment set up, moved the essentials, gentled her crazy rescue dog through the transition and launched Juliet Nail Design on schedule today. 

She's selling hand-painted pre-made and custom press-on nails, all of her own creation. She even found time in the midst of all this activity to make up a set for me.

I can't wait to see where this goes.

Into the Great Wide Open

My daughter is a big fan of Conor Oberst, and this morning she mentioned that the songs of his that seem the most positive to her are the ones that most people call bleak or depressing.

Example:




 I told her I thought that the way you heard a song had a lot to do with your own perspective on life.

That reminded me of a conversation I'd had with my sister long ago. She'd described Tom Petty's "Into the Great Wide Open" as negative and depressing, and I'd been surprised. See, I heard the sad story, the way things didn't go as expected, but I also heard, "The future was wide open..."




 Sure, I recognized the ironic use of the same phrase to portray endless possibility and endless blank space, but...well...what IS endless blank space if not endless opportunity?

At least, that's the way I've seen it for most of my adult life. And, when I had that conversation with my daughter this morning, I'd have told you that was still the way I saw it.

Sometimes, internal changes are the hardest to see.

The past 15 months have been quite a journey, more filled with change than any in a very long time. In the few months following the last presidential election, I said goodbye to two of the people I counted among my closest friends. The reasons were very different, but both were of that devastating nature that makes you wonder whether you ever really knew a person at all, and whether they ever knew you at all. That kind of discovery can make you question whether you can trust your own judgment about people. When it happens twice in three months, with people you've thought you were close to for more than a decade, it makes you pretty certain that you can't.

During that same few months, my daughter, who has been the focus of most of my adult life, turned 21. Shortly after, she broke up with her longtime boyfriend. It was a good choice for her, but one more big change, since he'd become a part of my family.

Quick summary: LOTS of new space in my life.

Just a few months earlier, I'd have seen that as a positive. See, as much as I love the people in my life, there's a significant part of me that's always yearned to be left alone to write. There's never been any question in my mind about what I would do with my "empty nest" years. But, there's always a glitch.

In the midst of all this, I had a "cardiac incident" of the "your blood pressure is on the verge of destroying your heart--get it down NOW if you want to keep functioning relatively normally" variety (as if I haven't been working fruitlessly toward that particular goal for nearly two decades).

The future wasn't looking so wide open. In fact, my health problems have always been the one obstacle I haven't been able to and didn't believe I could overcome.

I had a lot of work, and it was work I liked. I just kept raising my rates and it just kept rolling in anyway, and first I was booked a week out and then two and then a month, and then I was turning work away. It wasn't challenging work, but that was okay--I knew I could do it well and it paid well, and, though I didn't realize it at the time, I may have been afraid to commit to anything too challenging because something medical might crop up again.

It came anyway, as things do when the time is right. I'm working on a book about a legal/social issue I've felt strongly about for more than a decade. There's another interesting book with an interesting client waiting in the wings. A well-established company reached out to me to work on legal tech thought leadership pieces. My long-time favorite client wanted to re-up our work together.

I said yes to all of it and started cutting back on blogging and websites and the work that had been my bread and butter. But, I had a sense of anxiety I've rarely had about work before. I examined each project and couldn't find a reason. I'm confident in my ability to do each well. I'm not overbooked. They're all things I want to do.

Still, every time I passed up a website job or phased out a blogging client, that sense of anxiety reared it's head.

Until today.

Because this morning, I told my daughter that the way you heard a song depended on your outlook on the world. And, this evening, while I was fighting with all my might not to accept a safe and familiar website job, I opened Spotify and clicked on the "daily mix" they'd created for me, and the very first song they played was "Into the Great Wide Open."

I laughed out loud, as I always do when the message is so blatant.

The future IS wide open, and I don't need to hedge my bets.

You're Better than You Think You Are

If you happened to be awake and on the Internet in the early morning hours of October 2, you probably saw a non-stop stream of people offering help to strangers in the middle of the night. People offered rides, shelter, water, food--even their own blood--to anyone in need.

I've written before about how we see the best in people in the midst of a crisis or in the wake of a tragedy, how having life abruptly stripped to its essentials reminds us of what's most important. This time, it occurred to me that people aren't really different in those moments at all. They've simply been shaken free of distractions and remembered who they truly are.



If you stood in line for hours to donate blood in the wake of the Vegas shooting, you care about human life--even the lives of strangers.


If you had power during Hurricane Sandy and you threaded an extension cord and power strip out your front gate and left a note that anyone who needed to charge a phone or other device was free to share, you understand that even small contributions can make a huge difference to people in need--and you're willing to make those contributions.

If you immediately responded to the more recent round of hurricanes with donations to organizations working on the ground, you understand that providing relief to those in crisis is important--and you're willing to back that understanding with your wallet.

If you offered a place to sleep, or food, or water, then you don't like to see people hungry, thirsty and tired due to circumstances beyond your control--and you're prepared to do something about it.

This time, when the crisis ends, try to remember those things about yourself. You don't have to change your priorities or try to be a better person or anything so ambitious...you just have to remember who you are.

Every day of your life, you'll encounter a person who is hungry or thirsty or frightened, a person who needs a ride or just an encouraging word. Every day of your life, there are people in the world whose lives could be changed in some small (or huge) way by a small effort or contribution on your part. Every day of your life, you will meet a person on the street (or in the grocery line or on the telephone when you're angry because your cable doesn't work) whose day can be immeasurably brightened or darkened by the way you speak to him or her.

In those moments, don't tell yourself that you should care. Don't try to be better than you are. Instead, remind yourself that you DO care--that when confronted with those very same needs in an attention-catching way, you cared more about strangers than your comfort, keeping your car clean, whatever other plans you had for that money, getting a good night's sleep. That's who you are. Sometimes, that person gets buried or distracted by day-to-day life, responsibilities, stresses, even the quest for a new toy. But, when the chips are down and we see inside you, you're a person who stands for hours in the Vegas sun to give his blood to a stranger.

Don't forget that. Let us see that person every day.

It's the End of the World as We Knew It...

and I guess I feel fine. Life is good. But, I'm experiencing a rare bout of nostalgia.

Thursday night, changing clothes, putting on make-up, using grape-scented spray to make our hair even bigger, walking the mile from our dorm to Otto's.

Yesterday afternoon, DeKalb historical photographer Brad Oropeza (who also happens to be my daughter's boyfriend) called me from the corner of First and Lincoln Highway to tell me he was watching the building formerly known as Otto's being reduced to rubble.

The bar has been closed for a long time, and I hadn't been inside in much longer. Music had changed, Cosmopolitans had been invented, and life had gone on.

I've passed by that building, sitting quiet and empty, hundreds of times over the past couple of years. That slice of the world as we knew it ended long before they started knocking down the walls, and sometimes it made me a little sad to see it dark and cold. But, I generally don't give much time or attention to the past.

For a moment on Monday afternoon, that changed.  I looked at the pile of broken brick and stone where I'd sat down on the stairs and laid out every student ID, credit card and library card for the bouncer who didn't want to accept my state ID, and I saw my friends half a lifetime ago. I felt the familiar floor under my feet.

The things that happened there were for the most part not significant. A strange man disbelieved me when I told him my name, because a Tiffany song was playing when he asked. A friend fell on our way in the door, early and totally sober. The place was nearly empty at 8 p.m., and we persuaded her that no one had seen--but hours later, someone passing by said, "Aren't you the girl who fell?"

I cried over a friend I wished were more. Our table cleared when "I Melt With You" started to play. I walked away and left a beautiful but arrogant Greek soccer player standing alone on the dance floor. A man on the sidewalk outside sang "You are So Beautiful" to me. I did watermelon shots for the first time on the evening after another big first.

It was only a year. An academic year, in fact, not a full one. But, it was the year I turned 21. A year when the world was unfolding in front of me in exciting and unpredictable ways, and the dark, crowded bar was filled with music and people and sights and smells that were familiar and comfortable. It's been 29 years to the week since I graduated, and yesterday I found out that a lot of ghosts had been living in that abandoned building.

Last Train to Clarksville

It's the end of the summer of 1990. I'm 24 years old and driving from Georgia to the Chicago suburbs in my 1979 Mustang, accompanied by my 16-year-old sister, my friend Kim, and a toy poodle. Somewhere along the endless, multi-state stretch of Route 65, we see an exit sign for Clarksville, Tennessee.

Naturally, we decide to get off the Interstate and go looking for the train station. I'd like to blame this on my sister. Not only was she a huge Monkees fan as a child, but just this week she argued that they'd "held up." I can't, though. We were all equally eager to visit the famous train station and...take pictures? Sing? 

Our hopes were dashed, though.

After searching in vain for the train station or a visitor center--remember, there was no GPS or even Google in 1990--we spotted a bearded man walking down the street and pulled over. I rolled down my window and asked, "Can you tell us where the train station is?"

My sister says she still remembers the expression on his face. It only held for an instant, and then he laughed and said, "There's no train station here."

We laughed at ourselves as we made our way back to the Interstate, but I think we were all more than a little disappointed. It wasn't that we didn't get to SEE the train station so much as the sad news that it wasn't real.

27 years and dozens of hilarious retellings of this story pass.

It's Easter Sunday of 2017 and I'm sitting at my mother's kitchen table with my mother, my sister, my 21-year-old daughter and my daughter's boyfriend, who is a photographer specializing in historic sites (this becomes important later).

Well, not much later.

We tell the story. 

My sister says, "The look on that guy's face!" 

I look to my right, and I see that look again. This time, it's not followed by laughter. Instead, my daughter's boyfriend quietly passes me his cell phone.

This is on the screen:

Yeah, that's the historic Clarksville train station.

Unbelievably, this story that's been making us laugh (and others laugh at us) for nearly three decades just got funnier.

My sister and I had just been discussing a weekend trip around my birthday in June, and it's decided. We're going to Clarksville. We're TAKING THE TRAIN TO CLARKSVILLE. Maybe Kim (who I've seen only once in those 27 years) will want to MEET US IN CLARKSVILLE. 

On the way home, I say to my daughter, "So, there's a train station in Clarksville. This is the best thing that's ever happened to me."

"I'm glad to hear that," she says, "Because it could have been the worst."

This morning, just before I started to write this post, I consulted Google to get a picture of the train station. In the process, I learned that although there IS a train station in Clarksville and there IS a military base not far away, the writers of that song didn't know either of those things at the time. The original draft used "Clarksdale," which was a stop on their own train line, and they changed it because Clarksville sounded better.

We're going anyway.

January 24, 2017 in America

Earlier today, an online friend asked me to lie to her and tell her I thought we were all going to be okay. She’s an intelligent woman and not someone I’d think of as a head-in-the-sand type, and I’m pretty sure she knows I’m not going to lie. But, her comment made me think about what I’ve been putting out into the world for the past couple of months. So, this post is part balance, part mea culpa. None of it is a lie.

I do believe that we are at greater risk for both nuclear engagement and terrorist attacks on American soil than at any point in history. I also believe these potential conflicts, should they arise, will have a devastating impact on the world as a whole. I can’t sugar coat that, and those are risks I think most people aren’t taking seriously enough, so I tend to reiterate them.

I can count on my thumbs the number of times in my adult life that I’ve been able-bodied and clear-headed and entirely unable to think of a productive step to take. That’s the position I’m in now, and it’s beyond uncomfortable for me. It’s downright frightening.

In the wake of the election, I knew exactly what to do, from working with the faithless elector movement to providing legal research to some important (but ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to set things right. If our current administration starts bar coding Muslims or making good on some of our new President’s other insane promises, I know how to fight that.

I do not know of a single thing I, or you, can do to minimize the chances that Donald Trump will provoke a war out of ego and inexperience, nor that his anti-Muslim rhetoric will convince the Muslims of the world that we are their enemy. I’m not a marcher. I need direct, productive action steps. The uncharacteristic sense of helplessness I feel in not having an action step regarding these all-important issues, I think, makes me sound more alarmist than people are accustomed to.

That’s real.

But, it’s not the whole story.

I believe the vast majority of Republicans are not insane. The current legislature will undoubtedly make many decisions we don’t agree with and some, like the swift changes to health care legislation, will have a significant impact on millions of people. But, we can fight bad law. It’s happened before and it will happen again—at any point in time, our legislature seems wrong-headed and destructive to some of us. The current state of the legislature is, from my perspective, very bad news. But, it’s not cause for panic. When people say “he has both houses of Congress,” I don’t think that’s accurate. Paul Ryan and his ilk are not my kind of legislators, but they are not Donald Trump.

I believe that people with more information and more power than you or I are doing their jobs. That includes the U.S. intelligence community. These are people who—again, political beliefs aside—have devoted their lives to the security of the United States of America. They know more about Trump’s ties to Russia, his history and his financial dealings than we do, and if they conclude that he is under the influence of Putin, colluded with Russia or is otherwise intentionally acting against the interests of the country, I do not believe they will stand by and allow that to continue.

I am connected with a network of more than 120,000 attorneys who are committed to fighting to keep this country what it was meant to be—and, of course, there are many others who don’t happen to be part of this group. Members of this group started the faithless elector research, provided research assistance for the elector lawsuit in Colorado, uncovered the 50+ electors who were not legally entitled to serve in that capacity and started the early research on standing to file suit on the conflicts of interest issues. Others are teaching workshops to allow attorneys in other fields to step in and defend protesters, provide immigration assistance and fill other emerging needs.

Many of them, like me, are in a state of uncertainty. We’re mourning, angry and frightened just like every thinking person in the world. But, we don’t stay this way.  Our nature and our training is to analyze and act—and we’re just one group.

I am also very encouraged by the response from the rest of the world. Although it makes me physically ill to see other countries protesting the inauguration of the U.S. President in the same way they protested apartheid and the Tienanmen Square massacre, I am heartened to see that both citizens and governments around the world are prepared to act, and that they seem to see clearly that it is an individual and not our system or our people that pose a threat.

When tragedy and danger strike hand-in-hand, it’s disorienting. But, the initial shock passes. History says we’re a resilient people, and that once you get our collective attention, we can move mountains.

Meanwhile, our new President seems wholly preoccupied with his inauguration numbers and convincing himself that we don’t really disdain him as much as it appears. There’s a lot of criticism flying about that, but I’m happy to see it. The longer he remains distracted, the more time he invests in tweeting about his television show and persuading himself that a lot of people came to his inauguration, the less damage he’s doing. And, while he’s arranging for ringers to make it seem like what he says is well-received, intelligent, competent people around the country are shaking off the shock and mobilizing.

In Defense of Rural America

Let me be clear from the outset: I am not defending anyone's decision to vote for Donald Trump. If you know me in any context, you know that I am working day and night to try to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President. I respect differing viewpoints, but I believe there is a line where the question crosses from one of differing political views to one of character.

In theory, it's very black and white to me: a decent human being does not vote for someone who has threatened to force all Muslims to register with the government, who has suggested that Mexicans are rapists and criminals. That's an easy concept, in the abstract, and I have seen it voiced loudly, frequently and often viciously among the people at my side in the trenches over the past weeks.

I get it.

But, I'm burdened by reality.

I've lived in the rural Midwest for most of my adult life. I currently live in a county that went 59.32% for Donald Trump, and I suspect that number would have been higher had Gary Johnson not been in the running. During the years that I lived in the suburbs, one of my primary life goals was to get back to this small town. There were many reasons for that, but one of the most significant was the way people treated one another.

I heard what you just thought. I can see it in your head, that lily white little Mayberry town where everyone treats each other well because they're all exactly alike.

23.5 percent of my little Mayberry town is Hispanic. Our public schools were in the first wave of testing dual language education. Though the numbers are smaller, we are also home to African Americans, Asians of various descent and a small number of native Americans.

On my block alone there are whites, blacks, Mexicans and two Muslim families whose national heritage I do not know. By and large, no one gives a crap. And yet, there is a kind of ingrained racism in many.

My daughter works in a farm store, and several times each week someone--usually an older farmer--makes a snide comment about how he has to select English on the card reader. This is America, isn't it?

It makes her blood boil to the point that I fully expect that one day she will quit or get fired as a result of one of those conversations. Yet, having lived among these particular people for more than ten years and people like them for longer, I can tell you with absolute certainty that if any of them had an elderly Mexican neighbor who didn't speak English, the vast majority of those crochety old farmers would bend over backward to help her.

It was in this town that my white, agnostic-Wiccan blend daughter met her autistic, Mexican, paganish boyfriend while they were both volunteering for a Christian charity that embraced them both with open arms.

I've heard that kind of dissonance described as hypocritical, but I think it's something else entirely. The person standing next to you is a person, regardless of race, color or creed. You hear the things he says and see the way he behaves and share a laugh with him, and it's impossible to miss the fact that he's more like you than he is different. You don't assume a man is lazy when he's working beside you--you observe that he is or is not. You don't apply statistics from possibly-biased news sources to determine whether the single mother who lives next door to you depends on welfare--you see her leaving for work in the morning. In the face of three-dimensional humanity, those superficial characteristics like skin color and marital status fade into the background.

Black, white, Christian, gay, Muslim, Hindu, Middle Eastern, Mexican, straight..those are concepts. It's easy to attach a stereotype to a concept, or to seize hold of the stereotype that's offered to you. In theory, it shouldn't be. In theory, the idea that black men are criminals should clash in your mind with the fact of the black accountant down the hall at work who plays chess with you during lunch. But concepts are different from individual human beings around them--just like the concept of a person who would vote for Donald Trump is different than the individual humans around me.

That doesn't make the things they say okay. It doesn't make the fact that they've elected a crazy man who seems to hate everyone except the President of the Russian Federation to the presidency okay. But, it does bear thinking about, because while that war is going on between the minorities and liberal activists on one side and the guys in white rural America who bitch about the card machine but don't think much about race when confronted with an actual human, the real enemy is largely unattended.

The guys who voted for Trump not believing he could do what he said, taking it as the same kind of rhetoric as bitching about the card reader, believing he'd be a change and another career politician was the last thing we needed--they're an easy target. But, they're an easy target because they're not suited up for battle. They're just going about their lives. They're guilty, perhaps, of not thinking things through to their logical conclusion, of making decisions in the abstract, of not considering those individual human who will be affected. They're guilty, perhaps, of focusing too exclusively on how they and their families will be affected and not giving enough consideration to the world at large. That's wrong.

But, it doesn't change because we villainize them. It doesn't change because we force them down off the fence and onto the other side.

There are more good people in this country than there are bad ones...today. We can't spare any.

I haven't come to writing this post easily. Like many of you, I woke up on the morning after the election feeling like I'd been transported into a strange and hostile territory. I didn't feel entirely safe going outside, and I'm a white professional. That hasn't magically disappeared. I don't know how to tell which of these people around me is part of the "he says what we've all been thinking" brigade. It troubles me deeply that I might unwittingly be sitting next to someone who has been secretly thinking those things.

But here's what I know: these people around me, people the returns say overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump, have been by my side stocking shelves in the food pantry, Christmas shopping for children in need, feeding the hungry, raising funds for any number of important causes, running food drives and coat drives and making nursing home visits and donating books and...(you get the idea) to help people of all races and religions.

And, they're people who take the time to listen. People who don't mind giving you a ride even though you live ten miles outside town. People who will offer you their umbrella to take with you, or the coat they're wearing.

They're imperfect, like all of us. Some of them have big things to learn about the world beyond the borders of their little towns and the harm that casual, theoretical racism can do. But we're at war. And, we have limited resources. Do you want to go to war with the guy who bitches about the card reader and then drops off a nice big check to the soup kitchen serving the Mexican-dominated trailer park, or with the ones who spray paint slurs on walls and assault people who don't look like them and gather together in back rooms to work out a viable plan for registering Muslims?

The Flipside of Empowering Racists

I've heard a lot of concerns voiced over the past several months about how Donald Trump's rhetoric has empowered racists to come out of the closet and vent their hatred. To a degree, I view that as a positive sign: if that kind of poison is roiling around in the brain of the person sitting next to me on the bus or working in my office, I want to know about it.

Others, though, have rightly pointed out that it is dangerous. The racism that's been unleashed isn't just about people outing themselves because they finally feel like it's acceptable to be a bigot--there's also violence. It's clear that more people are at risk since Trump started saying those things racists believe everyone was thinking, and especially since the election created the impression that the majority of Americans agree with him.

But something else is happening, too.

Something I've seen congratulated and celebrated again and again at an individual level, but not recognized as a trend.

Good people are coming out of the closet, too. People who used to mind their own business are speaking up for a colleague when a racist comment is made. People who haven't mentioned a gay brother or Muslim son-in-law in social media because there was just no reason to make waves have recognized that if those things make waves, the problem lies with the other person.

They're often small acts--a comment made, an action reported, a disagreement where they once would have remained silent. But they're spreading. Just as racists and sexists and xenophobes and whatever it is that we call people who get unduly fussed about other people's sex lives are increasingly showing their true colors in public, so are those who recognize that humans are humans...and that the broken ones are those who can't see that.

Those bigots who are feeling liberated right now may just be in for a surprise.

Dear White People: Smile, Whether You Feel Like It or Not

I worked for legal aid in Georgia during the summer of 1990, and I saw many upsetting things. I saw large employers who paid training wages and no benefits for the first 90 days and then trumped up a reason to fire everyone before the higher rates kicked in and start over; prisoners with serious medical conditions denied access to care; manufactured reasons for keeping prisoners from the law library and even their own attorneys; restaurant management who apologized to white customers because there were "so many niggers" in the place and promised that they were working on it and much more... including a black activist who suggested to the crowd listening to him speak that perhaps they should kill me, since I was well-dressed and white.

None of that was the worst thing I saw that summer. The worst thing was the acceptance. The kind, smart, accomplished black women I worked with who comforted me and tried to get me to understand that the systemic racism was just how it was. The man who looked at me incredulously in a group of 15-20 people he did not know and confidently said, "Of course niggers are inferior." And, most of all, the number of black men who would avert their eyes, step to the side, even cross the street to avoid coming in contact with me as I walked along the sidewalk, and the way they would startle and look frightened if I smiled and said hello.

I learned that it was kinder not to greet them, though it never came naturally.

26 years have passed and, safely back in Illinois, I've chosen to assume that even in Augusta, Georgia, it is no longer shocking for a member of one race to greet another on the street. I've chosen to believe that no decent, hard-working adult feels he has to cross the street in deference to or fear of a member of another race.

Maybe it was even true. It was certainly true in my Midwestern world, where I'd never seen that sort of behavior in my life.

Like it or not, we woke up in a New America on Wednesday. Since then, I've been experiencing things that I'd never seen in Illinois before, that I saw only in the deep south more than a quarter of a century ago.

Wednesday afternoon, I shouted (at my dog, but he was out of sight) and a Muslim woman who happened to be driving down my tiny residential street with her child stopped her car and backed up, watching warily to see what I would do next. The next day, as I walked down the street alone, and elderly Mexican man stepped onto his porch a few houses ahead, saw me, froze with his hand on the door, and after looking at me for several seconds backed back into his house. This morning, a young Mexican man rounding the corner of his house saw me coming and simply stopped walking and stood perfectly still, half sheltered by the corner of his house, until I smiled and said good morning. He didn't answer, but he started moving again.

I'm not going to live in that world, and I hope you don't want to either.

So, what I'm asking is that if you're white, you remember that the onus is on you. As sick and afraid and angry and depressed and (insert every negative descriptor you know) as we may all be feeling, most of us white people aren't feeling directly threatened.

I find it unsettling, encountering another person on the street and not knowing what's in his or her head or heart. I feel a little bit like I've stumbled into an alien world where I can't tell the humans from the monsters. But, I'm not monster food.

I don't feel much like socializing. I'm not brimming with love for my fellow man right now. I definitely don't feel like smiling. But, I have to. And, if you're a decent human being who happens to be white, you do, too.

If your expression reflects how you're feeling in the wake of this election, every person of color, unpopular religious affiliation or alternate sexual orientation you pass on the street may reasonably believe you're making that face at him or her...and maybe it means you're hoping he gets deported, or that her "sick relationship" is finally torn apart, or even that someone would shoot him. Maybe that you could shoot him.

So smile, whether you feel it or not. Be friendly like someone's life depends on it, because it just might.

Note: I know the past couple of posts here have been unusual for this blog. I have a political/social blog, and of course considered keeping this content there rather than on my personal blog. In the end, though, I decided that there wasn't much that was more personal to me than the way human beings treat one another in the world around me. There are many other things going on in my life right now--a cool book project, a new granddaughter and more. But the biggest thing in my life right now, and I suspect for some time to come, is how I can do my part to make the people around me whose only crime is to have the "wrong" skin color or worship the "wrong" God or sleep with the "wrong" gender feel safe again.

If you are a minority in America this morning...

I’m sorry.

Like most people I know, I went to bed last night and woke up this morning sick and frightened. There have been many political candidates I disagreed with and even believed destructive over the years, but this is not that. I woke up to discover that I’d been crying in my sleep, something that has happened only a few times in my life and not for many years.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next, or how I’m supposed to interact with the people around me. My concern isn’t just the chaos and violence that is surely right around the corner, but also this horrible thing I have learned about the people I encounter in daily life.

But, I am a white professional. If I choose to, I can simply shut up and I will be safe and accepted among the people who voted to microchip you, deport you, bar you from an entire country based on the color of your skin or where you were born or the religion you practice.

I know my fear and uncertainty can’t possibly scratch the surface of yours.

I also know I can’t eliminate your fear and uncertainty. It’s well-founded. It may keep you alive. But, I do want to say two things that I hope you will hear and believe in.

The first is that you are not alone. For every person standing behind you in the grocery line who believes that Donald Trump said what we were all thinking, there is at least one who clearly sees that you’re a valuable human being who, in the most fundamental ways, is just like us. There are millions of people of all races and religions and ages and educational levels and shoe sizes who are prepared to fight for you.

The second is please, please don’t lash out. I understand the inclination, if you’re experiencing it. I think I might want to smash some things myself, if I didn’t feel so completely depleted. You will undoubtedly be provoked in a thousand ways in the days to come. But, those who provoke you know exactly what they’re doing. They want you arrested. They want viral videos that are edited to cut out the provocation and show only your angry response. They know there are millions of people in the neutral zone right now who can be turned against you.

Don’t let them frame the discussion. Don’t let them manipulate you into becoming the poster child for their campaign to amp up the hate, to mischaracterize everyone whose skin color matches yours or who wears the same type of clothing you do.

Watch your back, but do it with your head held high, and never forget that no matter how it looks right now, there are more of us than there are of them.

Well, this is embarrassing...

Every few months, I see a new bunch of my friends responding to that meme that asks you to list ten albums that changed your life. Often, they say that it's tough to narrow it down to ten.

I love music.

When I try to think of albums that changed my life, that just seems silly.

I can list my favorite albums for you. In fact, I've done that before. They include War (U2), Stealing Fire (Bruce Cockburn),  Armed Forces (Elvis Costello) and Rumours (Fleetwood Mac). I've been listening to all of them for decades. Sometimes they brighten my day or strike just the right note. Sometimes they bring back a memory that makes me smile out of nowhere, or create the soundtrack of a new moment.

Not one of them, so far as I can imagine, has had the slightest impact on the course of my life.

Recently, after the latest round, I asked my daughter (who would have trouble restricting herself to ten) whether I had an album that had changed my life.

She immediately said no. And then she smiled. It was a big smile, a happy smile, and yet somehow an evil smile.

And then she said, "Yes. There's one."

I said, "No."

But, I will admit that my eyes widened, and I may have put my hand over my mouth. Because, there was one album that literally changed the course of my life, and it was...um...this:

This isn't one of those guilty pleasure things. I actually don't like this album. 

If you've ever met me, you know that I am not the least bit self-conscious about being a hardcore Rick Springfield fan. I love his writing. I love him as a human. I even like a lot of his music.

Success Hasn't Spoiled Me Yet is his worst album. That's subjective, of course, but also kind of not. It's the lightest weight, the least personal and the most overproduced.

But, it was the first Rick Springfield album I owned. I did like it when I was 15...enough to buy the next album, and the next. Enough to find myself, at 17, sitting under a white on white poster associated with a much better album, typing on a blue portable Smith-Corona and thinking about one day writing a book about Rick Springfield.

Probably, if you're reading this blog, you know the rest of the story. No question that was a life-changer. But, I still really, really wish I had a different answer.

Something New

A new era is slowly dawning in my life. 

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that my daughter and I have lived and built our lives alone together for a very long time. 

She's turning 20 tomorrow, and though there's nothing magical about an official change of age, we've reached a stage of new pathways for both of us.

She didn't go away to college, and she hasn't officially moved out, so there's no clear, abrupt change like many families experience. But, change is in the air. And in my grocery shopping. And in that man I keep encountering at her side.

It's a whole new kind of journey, and one not everyone will be interested in, so I've given it it's own home. If you're interested in watching those roads diverge, or the lessons I learn as this stage of life unfolds, check out The Sporadically Occupied Nest.

Something Ordinary

So, life goes on.

We go back to work, do the laundry, slowly realize that there’s no longer a reason to panic when the telephone rings.

One day, Jesse’s mom points out to me that he’s been gone longer than he was here.

The timelines don’t make sense. He was only here for a moment. He was here as far back as I can remember.

I know this confusion is only a tiny fraction of the trauma and disorientation his parents are experiencing.

I’d like to end this post with some sudden sighting of a ray of sunshine, with a symbol or a moment or a morning of new hope. But, I don’t think it works that way in real life. I think the path to recovery is jagged, whether the injury has been small or large.

Ordinary things happen, whether you’re ready for them or not, and so I thought it was time to talk about some of mine, if for no other reason than that I don’t know how else to transition what I’m writing here.

I haven’t the heart to take down the Christmas tree because one of the dogs is so happy sleeping under it. I’m actually considering some sort of year-round indoor tree.

There’s a potentially exciting new client in the works.

Last night was a friend’s birthday, and the food was good and there was a lot of laughter.

I keep thinking Tori is all grown up and then she shows me something new. I begin to think it will always be that way. Maybe everything is. Maybe everything is just a little different from one day to the next, even when we don’t see the subtle shifting.

After the Ceremony

When I posted yesterday, I said that I hoped to circle back to the ceremony. But then, last night, my 19-year-old daughter, Tori, showed me what she'd written. I think she's said it all, and she agreed to let me share it here.

It's Thursday evening. I'm sitting on the floor at my aunt's feet. She sighs. "This really sucks," she says. "Yes" is all I can say in return. 

What else do you say to someone whose son is in the wooden box on the mantle?

By now you've probably heard all about Jesse, the premature baby boy who popped into our lives one December and hung out just long enough to change everything forever. But unlike the stories you've heard, this one isn't really about Jesse. It's about me. It's about his moms. It's about his aunts and uncles and close friends he never got to know. It's about family. Real family.

It's 9 o'clock on Thursday morning and I'm watching my aunt pace around the church. The memorial service doesn't start until 11. There's a table with framed pictures of Jesse and his moms, a guest book is laid out in front of it. The church is being filled with flowers. At 10, other family members start to arrive. They all follow the same strange pattern, entering the room, beginning to cry, hugging the nearest person and then, somehow, coming away laughing. We sit down in a full church at 11 on a Thursday morning. No one is surprised except my aunt.

While my aunts sit together, wrapped in their son's blanket, I look around. I shouldn't be surprised to see that most of their "family" has no actual blood relation to them. After all, I have no blood relation to them. But that doesn't matter now. I am standing behind them in a church pew watching them cry, holding another of their nieces in my arms. Where else would I be?

"What happened at the service?" my aunt keeps asking later. She was too overwhelmed to know what happened during most of it. We tell her the most simple things, the core things that get filed away and for some reason never forgotten. People spoke, sang songs. Your niece talked the whole time. Your mother cried. Everyone compiles their scattered memories and start to form a whole picture. It's full of little things. Specific details that stand out to certain people and not others become mixed with perceptions. The conversations vary. Stories are shared about the baby, about hospital stays, about lives. Jokes about kids, jokes between siblings and old friends. There's chocolate cake and costume changes. 

Before I leave for the night, I sit down next to one of my aunts. As she wraps her arms around me and kisses my cheek, I hear my boyfriend's words in my head. "They want to be your family," he said, "I see it. You just have to let them."

As I looked around at the crowd of people, I saw proof of that. They all came from different places, different worlds, backgrounds, struggles, and yet, they were all here to mourn a child they'd never even known. All because of my aunts. Because of what they had built. Because they let us in.

Saying Goodbye

Yesterday was Jesse's memorial service, I don't have a lot to say about it yet, because the defense system my mind and body opts for in the worst of times can best be described as "total collapse," so I have no clear thoughts and no inclination to get off of my couch today. I will very likely circle back.

For those too far away to have been with us yesterday, I thought that I would share what I wrote about Jesse for the service. I also want to thank everyone who was following Jesse's journey for the overwhelming show of support, words of encouragement, prayers, offers of practical help and more. There is much beauty in the world, even in the worst of times.

A few nights ago, I was driving alone at night thinking about Jesse and I saw a shooting star. That seemed appropriate, because a shooting star is so beautiful and vibrant and active, and then it's gone too soon. But then you smile. Even though it was fleeting, seeing it somehow made you better.

Usually, when someone stands up to speak under these circumstances, it's to pay tribute to someone they've known for years. Jesse was only with us for 13 days, and I only knew him in glimpses through a window and the stories JoAnn and Julie shared. But, like many of you, I loved him with my whole heart during those 13 days. 

It's surprising how much you can learn about a person under those limited circumstances. The first time I saw him, I expected him to be tiny and fragile. He was tiny. But, Jesse had a powerful spirit from the beginning. Though he weighed less than two pounds, there was strength in the way he waved his tiny hands and kicked his little feet. At 12 1/2 inches tall, he thought he was ready to take charge. He made a valiant effort to remove his equipment, push away the pads over his eyes with the tiniest hand I’d ever seen, and even kick the occasional nurse if he didn’t like what she was doing.

He knew his moms, and responded to their presence, their voices, and their touches. And, in his short life, he brought out aspects of them I'd never seen before. They loved him, and he loved them, and for 13 days that circle of love was all that existed for the three of them.

13 days, it turns out, is enough to change the people around you, enough to start ripples that will keep moving outward forever.

Of course, we would all have preferred to keep him with us longer, to watch him grow and see where that fighting spirit would have taken him. But, if heaven is the perfection of love and community, then Jesse couldn't have had a better bridge. The outpouring of love, support, and prayers sent his way was vast and unceasing, steady and certain in a way that comes to pass all too infrequently in this world. He couldn't be better prepared for the next, where we'll see him again one day, his powerful spirit free of the struggles he faced in that tiny body, but just as loved.