Like many Americans, I’ve been thinking about my relationship to Facebook. A few months ago, I wrote that the Facebook party might be over. Since that time, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone…only to reinstall it two months later because I was still going to the website several times a day anyways, and the app just makes it a hell of a lot easier to share things.
Plus, as I wrote in that previous post:
Facebook is a great tool for knowing — at least on a superficial level — what’s going on in the lives of the people I know, people I once knew, and people I want to know better.
So I’ve decided to keep my Facebook account. But I do want to change the way I use it.
I’m talking about the way politics has ingratiated itself into virtually every conversation and every interaction. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I try not to start conversations about politics, but I rarely prevent myself from participating in them.
I believe the personal is political. To attempt to separate personal matters from political matters is to commit the crime of privilege. Only the most privileged people in our country have the luxury to ignore the downstream effects of the decisions made in Washington D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles. Only the most privileged can pretend that “not talking about something” is the same thing as “being civil.”
There has to be a space where you can share a picture of your grandmother on her 100th birthday and neither of us feels the need to mention the way our society fails to provide adequate care to millions of elders due to the for-profit nature of our healthcare system.
A space where you and I can meet, smile, and care about one another without asking ourselves how our words and actions will effect the results of the next election.
I’ve decided to try to create that space on my personal Facebook page.
With that being said, I hope you want to engage with me outside of the bubble of that peaceful, partisan-free space. I also hope that you have found my more politically-minded blog posts to be interesting and thought provoking, or that they’ve challenged you or inspired you to think differently about a topic or opened your mind to a perspective you hadn’t considered.
Last night, my wife and I had a two or three minute conversation about the candidates in today’s Vermont Democratic Primary. I was woefully uninformed, and before going to bed, she gave me a homework assignment to get more informed and to write about it.
I worked from about midnight until 3:30 in the morning, keeping diligent notes as I researched and writing out my rational for why I was voting for each candidate. I only got so far as the statewide offices, but here’s what I came up with.
The Who’s This What Now?
First: why should we even care who is on the ballot?
If someone votes in the Democratic primary, the chances of them not voting for the Democrat in November, regardless of the candidate, are essentially null. So, from an individual’s perspective, why even bother with the primary part? Why not just stay home, keep living our lives, and let other Democrats decide who the candidate should be?
Well, I’m not sure you’ve heard, but the Democratic party is in the middle of an internal battle right now. One side in that battle seems to prefer corporate-backed American centrism that maintains an economic status quo that benefits the richest people in New York and California while offering sops to the poor and middle class (as if the latter even existed anymore).
The other side seems to be powered by people who actually come from the poor and middle class: bartenders and union workers, first- and second-generation immigrants, male and female soldiers, transgender pioneers, etc. These are real, actual people who know what it feels like to struggle with the most basic elements of life. The people who actually are part of the 99%.
For some of the people in this battle, it’s a fight to the death. Healthcare, literally, depends on it. Income, literally, depends on it. Education, literally, depends on it. And so on.
While it’s true that most Democrats will vote for whatever Democrats are on the ballot in November, today is the day when we decide which kind of Democrat our candidates are going to be. Are they going to be for slow, almost imperceptible improvements to the status quo, or are they going to stand up and be counted as your proxy vote for real change?
Vermont’s Democratic Candidates for the National Stage
For Vermont’s national representatives, we have two candidates running for U.S. Senate and three candidates running for the U.S. House.
The incumbents, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Peter Welch, are on the ballot, and I suspect they will each win in a landslide.
U.S. Senator
Senator Sanders is considered by most of the party faithful to be an honorable and well-intentioned individual who is highly informed on a number of issues and incredibly sympathetic to the needs of the poor and middle class. He’s so well loved by so many people that, even at his advanced age, some still see him in him the future of their party.
Sen. Sanders’ primary challenger, Folsade Adeluola
His challenger is Folsade Adeluola. She is 55 years old, and she’s lived in Vermont for less than a year. A single mother of a special needs child, she is a self-described activist of Nigerian heritage who promises to serve as Vermont’s Senator for one term and one term only.
She differs from Senator Sanders in a number of ways, if only by virtue of her birth, but their differences don’t amount to much when it comes to their policy preferences. The biggest difference is that Adeluola doesn’t want to run for President in 2020, so she won’t waste her time thinking about the needs of the other states. She says she’ll work for Vermonters, and only for Vermonters.
It’s an interesting point, but the U.S. Senate is a national body and not a state one, and I want my representative to have a real voice in national conversations. Senator Sanders has that voice right now, and it will only get amplified the closer we get to 2020. Sen. Sanders represents my views closely enough for me to treasure his committment to his principles. His long and honorable experience as a government official also earns him my vote.
U.S. Representative
Representative Peter Welch is the incumbent, but I’m not voting for him. Instead, I’m voting for Ben Mitchell.
Vote for my fellow Goddardite, Ben Mitchell
I’m voting for Ben Mitchell because he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Goddard College and he now teaches at Landmark College, which is a college for students with learning disabilities…you know, like the high school where I teach and like the exact degree I have from the exact college I went to? Yeah. I don’t know shit else about him, but Ben Martin has my vote.
We Goddardites need to stick together. Our alumni outreach isn’t as influential as Harvard’s, so if the least I can do is vote for my Goddard brothers and sisters on the ballot, then that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Did I mention that Ben Martin is a member of the Socialist Party and the Liberty Uion party? I long ago published that I’m a communist sympathizer, so I’m down with the Socialist Party thing.
The Liberty Union Party is the one that, in 1971, nominated Bernie Sanders to be its very first candidate on the political stage and the one he was chair of when he resigned from it and became an independent in 1979, not because he disagreed with the party but because not enough people were showing up to the meetings (Bernie Sanders threw a party, and no one showed up; so the fucker went rogue).
And did I mention that Ben Martin is also a guitarist and he helped organize “Poets Against The War” in 2003, both of which probably put him on the right side of just about everything I care about?
Yeah. I’m voting for this guy.
Too bad he’s not a woman because the U.S. House of Representatives needs more of those.
Vermont’s Statewide Candidates
With the national candidates taken care, let’s look to the statewide offices. In Vermont, we vote for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, State Treasurer, and State Auditor.
Governor
The Democratic candidates for Governor (none of whom earned the nomination of my own Progresive Party) are James Ehlers, Christine Hallquist, Brenda Siegel, and Ethan Sonneborn.
James Ehlers
James Ehlers seems to be a little bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. While calling himself a progressive now, he was once described in a local newspaper as “a well-known conservative” and shared articles on social media critical of Planned Parenthood.
He argues that he’s an agitator who will ask hard questions of both allies and opponents, such as the questions he asked in 2002 in an Op-Ed about why his interests as an angry white man were not represented on the political stage.
Yeah, I’m not voting for this dude.
Christine Hallquist
Christine Hallquist, on the other hand, is vying to become the nation’s first openly transgender governor, after becoming the nation’s first openly transgender gubernatorial candidate. She has only been openly living as a woman since 2015, when “she began wearing a wig and a blouse to work, publicly coming out as a woman named Christine to her employees at the Vermont Electric Coop, the utility she had led for years as a man named Dave.”
This tells us she’s brave, and that she’s smart enough to lead several employees at a statewide utility co-op. The way she’s running her campaign shows us that she’s also smart enough to gain financial donations from the country’s politically connected transgender community, all of whom are angling to see one of their own elected to a major office, a governor of one of the fifty states.
Here’s why I am probably voting for her: because I have (too slowly) come to realize that transgender teenagers are among some of the most suffering individuals in our communities, that more than 40% of transgender individuals report having attempted suicide, and that transgender women are significantly more likely to be murdered than their cis peers. As a teacher, I have seen with my own eyes the physical, emotional, and spiritual turmoil that transgender individuals can suffer.
If any community needs a national win right now, it’s theirs.
Personally, I want the transgender teenagers I work with every day to see a possible future for themselves, a place where they are not only recognized and accepted by the wider community, but elected to serve as its leader and representative.
I also like that, according to Politico, “During her time at the helm [of Vermont Electric Coop], she steered the utility from the brink of financial ruin and increased the share of its energy coming from carbon-free sources while limiting rate hikes.”
Economically, she’s focused on the infrastructure behind Vermont’s access to today’s most vital resource: the Internet. She would like to “connect every home and business in Vermont with fiber optic cable utilizing proven rural cooperative models.”
On other issues, she’s definitely still learning how to talk to the media. She’s for “regulating guns like we regulate automobiles,” she told Politico, “but I really don’t want to talk about it.”
She also thinks Bernie’s economic platform wouldn’t work on a statewide scale, telling Politico, “I don’t think it works from a governor’s standpoint.”
To me, this latter remark maybe puts her a little closer to the “centrist” side of the battle for the Democratic party, as does her desire to see Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden stump for her in the general election, but to be honest, I think I’m in this one for my students.
The other two candidates are destined to go down as my “also rans.” The first is a 14-year-old boy. You can read about him on CBS News.
Brenda Siegel
The second, Brenda Siegel, describes herself as “a low-income single mom” who “lost all of [her] belongings” during Tropical Storm Irene. She works as “the Executive Director and founder of the Southern Vermont Dance Festival,” which was founded to create economic activity in the wake of Irene. She’s also “an educator and anti-poverty activist.” She has been elected to several committees and “has long been heavily involved in politics and activist work, locally, statewide, and nationally.”
Her major focus is the economy, which she believes requires an increase in tourism. She wants people from around the country and around the world to come to Vermont and “be inspired to shop, eat, stay and visit throughout the year.”
She writes that we need to “re-think our outdated beliefs about what makes a thriving economy.” She wants an economy that works from the bottom up, concerning herself more with Vermont’s small businesses than with its big businessmen.
With a small business economy like Vermont already has, she believes the focus needs to be on driving new customers in the door, and the best way to do that is to make our consumer base bigger than the state’s population. We need, as an economy, to drive tourism.
She also has personal experience with the opiod epidemic, having lost a nephew to a heroin overdose, and the state’s education issues, having taught at all levels of the system.
She sounds as if she might have some actual experience when it comes to sitting down at a table to get things done, but I’m not sure I want my governor’s greatest professional accomplishment to be organizing a dance festival in Brattleboro. I’m sure she’s a nice person, but I have friends who organize events like that, and I wouldn’t want them to be my state’s chief executive officer.
Lieutenant Governor
David Zuckerman
Simple. I’m voting for David Zuckerman in November, so I don’t give a shit who the Democrats are. Zuckerman is the leading member of my official party, the Vermont Progressive Party, and he has my unqualified support for his candidacy.
I don’t know a whole lot about him, but I trust my Progressive brethren who nominated him.
Attorney General
T.J. Donovan
The Democratic candidate for Attorney General, T.J. Donovan, is running unopposed in the primary. He is our current Attorney General.
Donovan has been an Assistant District Attorney, a Deputy State’s Attorney, and State’s Attorney, and now he’s our Attorney General. Seems like a reasonable path.
I think I’ll support him against his nonexisting opponent.
Secretary of State
Jim Condos
The Democratic candidate for Secretary of State, Jim Condos, is also running unopposed in the primary, and he’s also the incumbent, having served as our Secretary of State since 2011. He’s basically the guy in charge of all of the information: how does it get filed, who does it get routed to, who has access to it, and how can they find it?
You want to start a business in Vermont? He’s your guy for finding out fees, filling out applications, and getting good, reliable information about how to do it “for real.”
You want a trademark? That’s him too. Gotta look up a regulation? Research something in the state’s archives? Set up a public election for your town? That’s what your Secretary of State helps you do.
I gotta tell you, as a curious individual, a teacher, and the writer of an experimental novel that speculates about how an independent Vermont could one day be governed, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on state-run websites, accessing all kinds of information and researching all kinds of intricacies of the system, and I gotta say: I’ve been impressed with how transparent everything has been, how neutrally worded and neutrally presented, almost as if there were invisible tunnel between me and the information I needed.
If that’s not the work of a successful Secretary of State, then I don’t what is. Jim Condos might be running unopposed, but I think he’s actually earned my vote.
State Treasurer
Elizabeth Pearce
Another Democratic incumbent, Elizabeth Pearce, is running unopposed on the primary ballot. She’s worked in government finance for over 30 years, opposes Governor Scott’s proposal to set up a lease-to-own arrangement with a private prison company to build a new state prison and psychiatric care facility, supports immediate action when it comes to protecting the state’s water, and serves as the 2018 President of the National Association of State Treasurers (in other words, when it comes to all of the other state’s treasurers, they elected her to lead them). Sounds like a reasonable persons to vote for.
State Auditor
Dan Hoffer
Again, the incumbent, Dan Hoffer, is running unopposed in the Democratic Primary. He first moved to Burlington in 1988 to take a position in Vermont’s Community & Economic Development Office under then-Mayor Bernie Sanders. He entered the private sector in 1993, where he remained until his election as State Auditor in 2012.
He’s looking to improve transparency around the budget and performance reports, strengthen the state’s whisteblower protections, enforce mandatory bidding processes for state contracts, and strengthening the screening process for businesses who benefit from the state’s workforce education grant program.
Sure. Why not?
Don’t Forget to Vote
There are local and county offices up for grabs as well, but the audience for those are too narrow for me to get into here. Suffice to say, I live in a Republican-leaning town in a Republican-heavy county, and there’s not enough progressive women, progressive people of color, or progressive young people on my local ballot.
If we really want change, then we have to change the identity of the people sitting at the table.
Provided, of course, that Bernie, a white Jewish man in his seventies who has earned my loyalty and trust, is sitting at the head of that table.
Last Spring, just days after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida (which, I’m unhappy to report, some people have already forgotten; while visiting Chicago last week, I had to remind someone which school shooting Parkland was, and even after I reminded them, I’m not 100% sure they remembered — though I guess that’s easy to forgive when, as Chicagoans, they saw 66 people shot just in the one full weekend I was there) — anyway, just days after Parkland, the Vermont State Police arrested a young man from my hometown for planning to shoot up a neighboring school (“planning to,” mind you; he didn’t actually load up a gun and walk into the school — though he did write about and talk about his plans and he had purchased and was training himself to use a gun).
Prosecutors charged him with “attempted murder” despite his never actually attempting the crime. His lawyers appealed, and through a ruling ostensibly related to a bail hearing, the Vermont Supreme Court essentially forced the state to drop the charges of attempted murder, citing a lack of evidence when it came to the legal requirements of the word “attempt.”
For the record, I completely agreed with the Vermont Supreme Court, but I am also sympathetic to the desire of the prosecutors to protect local community members from Jack Sawyer’s seriously threatened act of massive and deadly violence.
Based on the already demonstrated evidence, I suspect Mr. Sawyer will be — and ought to be — found guilty (well, the second charge could be sticky, since it assumes the deadly weapon is being carried at the same time the accused is going to act on his purpose, and the Supreme Court has already supported the idea that Mr. Sawyer did not yet act on his purpose…but there may be case law that defines 13 V.S.A. § 4003 more deeply than the legislative record, so I make no judgements here).
Current Status
The latest twist in the case, however, is that the lawyer for Mr. Sawyer has asked the court to award his 18-year-old client “youthful offender status.”
When a defense attorney requests youthful offender status, “the case is…immediately sealed and the process starts with risk assessments from the Department for Children & Families. If an offender is deemed a low or moderate risk to re-offend, the prosecutor is instructed to send the case to diversion,” rather than to the criminal justice system.
“Diversion” is, essentially, a system of nonprofits funded by the state’s Attorney General’s office to handle specific cases using the Restorative Justice Model, rather than the traditional retribution and correction model.
If Jack Sawyer is granted youthful offender status, the public will have no right to follow his case as it moves through the system, but (ideally) he will be steered towards restoring whatever harms his actions may have caused, whether through community service, direct payments, or victim-offender interactions.
Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?
Examining The Question
Let’s start with the reality that people in this community are genuinely frightened of sending their children to school knowing that an 18-year-old person told police that they can’t stop him from acting on his violent urges. According to his own threats made directly in the face of police officers, as soon as he has the chance, he is going to come for the children in that school.
When a person makes that kind of threat in a neighborhood filled with easily accessible guns, the community’s desire to constantly know the whereabouts of that individual is valid (especially as the new school year is about to begin).
But the state of Vermont, through a legislative process, admits that people under the age of 23 make irrational decisions based on the particular cooking time of their brains. To try them as adults without interrogating the particular details of each unique brain is to judge them too harshly. It is to ignore the reality that their brains are still under development, and hence, more open to communal influence of both a negative and positive sort.
If a person were to go through the diversion process under the paranoid eye of rightfully frightened parents, peers, and neighbors, the communal influence is not likely to be so positive. Thankfully, the state of Vermont, like all states (I hope), keeps its youth diversion process confidential. Youthful offenders who move successfully through the process can have their cases sealed and their records expunged, preventing the actions of their partially developed brains from hindering the future of their fully developed ones.
Those are the realities in our community today. As a state, we are frightened of the unknowns when it comes to Jack Sawyer’s threats; and as a state, we admit that he might just be a kid who has ventured way beyond his depth, and now it’s time for us, as a community, to jump in and save him.
There is a process to this. Some people — some of our neighbors — are going to look hard at this case, and they’re going to decide whether Mr. Sawyer’s brain is fully cooked, and if it’s not, whether he’s likely to be successfully diverted from acting on his threats.
I don’t envy the job of these people. If they decide he’s a youthful offender, you’ll hopefully never hear his name again, and Jack Sawyer will go on to live a quiet, peaceful life where he brings tri-colored pasta salads to neighborhood cook outs and volunteers to coach first base at his daughter’s softball games. But if they’re wrong, Jack Sawyer may one day live a loud, demonstrative life where some people across America will know his name…for at least a couple of hours.
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band operates on the principle that all of the songs you’re about to hear are part of a show, performed by the kind of corny band your parents used to listen to but produced to such an incredible degree that you can’t help but marvel at the artistry.
The album opens with a bald-faced introduction to the concept. Here is a bunch of music, they tell you, that has “been going in and out of style,” for the past twenty years, but still, it’s “guaranteed to raise a smile.” Then with just the right kind of fanfare, they introduce you to the singer, “the one and only Billy Shears,” who like the crooners of old, regales you with a comforting, family-friendly melody.
The girl with kaleidoscope eyes
The choice to follow “With A Little Help From My Friends,” — a song that is as corny as they come, sung by the Beatle with the weakest vocal abilities — with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” reminds the younger generation that this music is intended for them and not their parents.
We know what you’re going through, the song tells them, how crazy everything seems, but you don’t have to fight against it. Just lay your head back, picture yourself on a train in a station with plasticine porters with looking glass ties, suddenly…you’re falling in love, and falling in love…with the girl with kaleidoscope eyes…ahhhhhhhhhhh
A song like that can only fade into a harsh poking guitar and a singer who tells you, “I gotta admit, it’s getting better (better), a little better all the time (it can’t get no worse).”
If ever there was a way to describe both the time period when Sgt. Pepper’s… was first recorded and our own, that line indeed might be it. Both then and now, progressive forces seemed to be on the cusp of something, and both then and now, the reactionary response from the wider culture had (has) turned violent.
From one point of view, it was (and is) getting better; from another, it couldn’t (and can’t) get much worse.
But how do you help it keep getting better? How have past generations worked to get us this far?
By “fixing a hole where the rain gets in.”
Keep plugging away, the Beatles tell the younger generation. Fix the holes. Plug the cracks. Take your “time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday.”
And if you follow that advice? “She’s leaving home after living alone for so many years.”
Making progress, moving forward, can sometimes mean leaving the people who love you behind, leaving them in the cottage where they raised you to fix the holes and plug the cracks, because making progress, moving forward, can sometimes mean recognizing there’s “something inside that was always denied for so many years.” And so, bye….bye.
And then what? Now that you’re out the door, on your own, what should you do? Should you start plugging the holes in society?
No, the Beatles tell you. Go to the circus, where “of course, Henry the Horse dances the waltz.” And if you want to have a real good time, make sure you’re stoned when you go, because “tonight, Mr. Kite is topping the biiiiiiiiilllll….”
Huh. Okay. Sure. But then what?
Go find a fucking religion man. Look over there, in the park, a couple of dudes playing on sitars. Listen to them.
George Harrison & Ravi Shankar
“We were talking,” one of them starts singing, “about the space between us all and the people who hide themselves behind the wall of illusion. [They] never glimpse the truth, [and] then it’s far too late when they pass away.
“We were talking,” he continues, “about the love we all could share, [and] when we find it, to try our best to hold it there with our love. With our love, we can save the world, if they only knew.
“Try to realize it’s all within yourself. No one else can make you change and to see you’re really only very small, and life goes on within you and without you.”
Whoa, you think. That’s pretty heavy.
“No,” they say. “He’s not done. The man can fucking play that thing too. Listen.”
And you do, and though maybe you’re a little jaded in this day and age, you really sit and listen to the way that motherfucker plays the sitar, and you’ll be damned if someone’s gonna tell you he can’t play it well.
He starts singing again. “We were talking about the love that’s gone so cold and the people who gain the world and lose their soul. They don’t know. They can’t see.” He looks right at you and sings, “Are you one of them?”
You don’t know how to answer.
“When you’ve seen beyond yourself,” he continues, “then you may find that peace of mind is waiting there, and the time will come when you see we’re all one and life flows on within you and without you.”
The song ends, and you look around at the rest of the crowd, and feel relieved when everyone else starts to laugh.
Man, you giggle to yourself, that shit was heavy.
Someone pushes gently on your shoulder, turning your attention to a new band that just walked into the square. Oh, hey, you think. Let’s listen to these guys. They’ve got a fun little sound, an oopma-loompa kind of thing, like maybe your grandparents might have listened to. There’s no guitar, but that bell is pretty cool. Your head starts nodding. Your knee bounces in time. They could be singing about the love between your grandparents, and really, “Who could ask for more?”
They could be singing about me, you think. Or Vera, or Chuck, or Dave, and then the singer hits you with it: “You’re sincerely wasting away.” Whoa, you think. That’s kind of heavy too. It’s almost like what the other guy said: “Life goes on…without you.”
Fuck it, I’m outta here, you think. I’ll walk down this street, past these cars, past these parking meters. Oh shit, look at that dude. He’s all stalking that meter maid, creeping up on her, dancing around her, trying to be all charming. You can see his boner from here, and he says to her, “When are you free to take some tea with me?” You can tell from the way he’s dressed that if she falls for it, she’ll be paying for the creepo’s dinner.
Onward, you think. To your Freedom. The circus behind you. Those heavy Hindu thoughts too. Your head held high as you make your way down the…is that a fucking rooster? What time is it? A crowd of businessmen rush at you. “Good morning, good morning, good morning,” they all say, like robots going through a pre-programmed day. They have nothing to say but “good morning, good morning, good morning.”
You start feeling all punky, walking through the streets, judging everyone you make eye contact with. People bustle around you, living their pre-scripted little lives. A whole day passes. It’s getting dark. “I need the time,” someone says behind you. A cat mews loudly, a dog barks, was that a horse? What the fuck is going on? You start spinning around, your senses overwhelmed by the world.
Then, all of sudden, a curtain rises, and there they are again, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!
“Good morning, good morning, good morning.”
It’s all been a fucking show, you realize, and you’re the one onstage! How the fuck did that happen? What do you do with your hands? The band gives you a look, someone takes your arm and ushers you offstage. The band follows, all of you going together.
They lead you to the green room. Someone lights up a joint. One of them starts to play a guitar. Another takes a seat at the piano. The bass rises, and it’s just you and them, seated comfortably, surrounded by four safe wall. One of them starts to sing, telling you about his day. “I saw the news today,” he sings, and then he proceeds to sing you the news. Afterwards, he tells you about a film he went to see. “The English Army had just the won war.” The movie didn’t fly with the audience, he tells you, but he’d read the book, and he just had to look.
Someone passes you the joint. You inhale and the room begins to spin, and spin, and spin.
My alarm!, you think. You’re late. You wake up, get out bed, you rush through your morning routine. Down the stairs. Grab your coat and hat. Run to the bus. No thoughts, just action. Do it. Now, up the steps. Good, you made it. You’ve got a few minutes to relax. Look out over the city. Have that smoke. And then somebody speaks, and you fall into a dream…and you sail away, over it all, above it all, beyond it all, away from it all…
And then, boom. “I read the news today.”
Oh boy.
You can dream, you think, but you can never get away. Fix the cracks. Count the holes. You’ll find the answer. And then maybe someday, you’ll tell us all.
You close your eyes and fade to black.
And out of the blackness, the voice of the collective unconscious.
“Never goosy any other way. Never goosy any other way. Never goosy any other way.” Around and around in the blackness, the sound of society’s collective insanity.
You and I need to talk about — consider — think about — privilege.
Privilege is about power. To be called privileged is to be called powerful.
But it is also to be told that you did not earn (at least in part) your power.
People don’t like to be told they haven’t earned their power. They believe they’ve scraped and struggled for whatever power they have. Nearly everyone believes their life is a struggle — in fact, according to both Buddha and biology, life is struggle. Every living thing — from human to paramecium — struggles in its own way, and we hope against hope that life is just chrysalis.
If you’ve made it this far in life, you feel it’s because you’ve struggled to achieve and maintain whatever power is yours.
But to be told you’re privileged is to be told you possess more power than you’ve earned.
On White Privilege
I bring this up because of the increasingly common phrase, “white privilege.”
White privilege is a way of simplifying the entire history of the white race and bringing it to a conclusion that says all of the white people on the planet right now possess at least one benefit that they, themselves, did not earn, a benefit that comes from a wicked notion, spread by lies and propaganda, that those with white skin deserve, by virtue of their skin, more attention and respect than everybody else.
This benefit has a flip side. It reinforces the notion that those without white skin do not deserve attention and respect.
Millions of people have died — and continue to die — due to the widespread notion that people of color (i.e., nonwhite people) do not deserve attention and respect, that their lives, in fact, do not matter. Thankfully, we continue the fight against overt and covert racism, but to be on the right side of that fight, those with white privilege have an obligation to admit their privilege to themselves.
The political conversation, the money, the culture — the power — has long been and continues to be dominated by white people. The act of domination is so absolute that it changed the very skin color of Jesus Christ, the majority’s Lord and Savior, from brown to white.
In short, can I consider all of life’s options without worrying about whether my race (and my race alone) will hold me back?
If you are white and you answer those question honestly, you have to admit, on the basis of whiteness alone, you possess privileges that others do not possess.
That privilege is power, and it’s time to admit — it’s your obligation to admit — you have it.
What To Do With Your White Privilege
Do nothing.
Look around you for a second. Look at the world around you and recognize that some great wisdom comes from other cultures and other ways of being, wisdom that people have fought to preserve for a very long time, wisdom that survived despite white people forcing it to go underground, wisdom that, in fact, stood opposed to the horrors enacted by white colonialism.
This wisdom stood (and stands) proudly and strongly and without a trace of fear. We ought to hear from it more often. We ought to allow it — invite it — into our politics, boardrooms, bedrooms, and classrooms.
Women. People of color. Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgendered, and every other color of pride. Their lives — their historic and cultural ways of being — have led them to wisdoms that white men have long been blinded to, focused as we have been on the struggle to become and maintain the dominating power, wisdoms of tolerance, acceptance, and cooperation, not to mention wisdoms of empathy and service.
Now is the time for white people to stop. To do nothing. To give someone else a chance to speak up and make decisions.
As a white person, don’t speak, don’t argue, don’t run for office.
It’s not that you don’t have the right to. It’s that it’s no longer right to.
And what do you do if you’re in a room full of white people? You use your privilege to make sure there’s never a room like that again.
As Jon Fishman, a white man, once sung, “I want a fat, black, poor, and handicapped, old single mother lesbian with a high IQ in the White House for President and non-denominational too.”
What does that mean for Fluid Imagination?
I am a white person who self-publishes a blog. I find some topic of the day or week, and I write an opinion about it. I share my argument.
Does my advice to “do nothing” mean I should stop? Should I just shut up and close Fluid Imagination down?
I suspect the answer is yes.
But I like to think of myself as an ally in this fight, and right now, I’m willing to die for the cause.
Resilience requires two main ingredients: the ability to bounce back from adversity and the ability to grow from challenges.
Earlier this week, I started an online class offered by the University of Pennsylvania on how to apply the principles of positive psychology to the development of one’s resilience. I hope to implement its most salient lessons at my school: from a structural standpoint (how can our school become more deliberate in the development of our students’ resilience?), a pedagogical standpoint (how can my colleagues and I construct our lessons with an eye on resilience development?), and from a friendship standpoint (how can my colleagues and I become more resilient in the way we respond to the adversities in our own lives?).
Along with a lecture, our assignments this week contained two stories about how two different people demonstrated resilience in the face of adversity. The point of the stories was to highlight some of the major variables that go into the makeup of resilience. Those variables were the subject of the lecture. For a homework assignment, I’m supposed to tell my own resilience story and to identify the ways those variables manifest throughout it. This is that story.
~~
I’ve never been to war. I’ve never lost a limb. I’ve never suffered from a major injury or illness. All of my family members continue to live a respectable length of time. I’ve been very, very lucky.
So lucky, in fact, that the biggest obstacle I’ve had to face (I think) is my anxiety disorder. I make no apologies for that. I am incredibly grateful for everything I have — even those things that only came to me due to my white, straight, cis, male privilege. I understand why I feel as grateful as I do, and I work every day to help more people feel that way too. I make no apologies for that.
What I do make, though, is payments to a pharmaceutical company.
The first anxiety attack I can identify happened when I was in high school. I was with a group of friends at a house on the harbor. One of my friends had a boat moored in the harbor, and everyone (maybe half a dozen of us) wanted to take it out for a ride. Everyone stripped off their shirts, dove in, and started swimming for the boat. I joined them, but even as I jumped into the water, I knew something was wrong.
The first thing was that I knew I wasn’t a strong swimmer, and I doubted my ability to actually reach the boat. The second thing was that some of the people in the group weren’t my “friends” exactly, as much as they were “the popular kids.” I got along with them well enough to sometimes pal around with them when the circumstances were meet. As I jumped into the ocean, I not only feared the water, but also the embarrassment my drowning would cause.
I jumped in anyway, and about halfway to the boat, my greatest fear came true: my muscles cramped, my heart-rate shot up, and the incoming and outgoing waves didn’t care. I started to drown.
I am five-feet, six-inches tall. I was in water that was maybe five-feet, nine-inches deep, with the waves increasing that by maybe two or three inches every few seconds. My muscles didn’t want to bounce me off the bottom of the harbor, but I forced myself to do it anyway. “Help!” I called out, my head above the waves for a moment, and then the salt water down my throat. Bounce! Cough, cough. “Hel…” Water in mouth. Bounce.
Then I saw him: Gigantor, strolling through the waves like a titan, each stride long and slow and strong, his arm reaching out, his hand approaching me in slow motion.
I grabbed at it, clawed at it, “Help me!,” and he did.
Out of everyone in that group, he was the one I knew was my friend. He had been there in the past; he would be there in the future; and here he was now, again.
He laughed the whole way over to the boat, him walking on his flat feet, me holding onto his shoulder for dear life with my torso and legs dragging in the water behind us. He pushed me up onto the boat; the others had caught on to what was happening, and they pulled me up too. I sat on the edge of something and coughed salt water onto the deck. “Are you okay, man?” “You okay?” “What happened?”
Someone started the boat and we drove off.
It wasn’t until later that I recognized the incident for what it was: an anxiety attack. My body didn’t give out — I was in my teens, and while I wasn’t a strong swimmer, I was a regular athlete, playing hours of basketball virtually every day; my body was in fine shape. What gave out was my mind. I was so anxious before I even began that I manifested my eventual failure.
The next anxiety attack I can identify happened about five years ago. I’m a little confused as to the timeline, but my wife and I were living in the last rental we’d have, an octagonal house set back from a country road (and hidden completely by trees in the summertime). I was teaching at two different jobs, one at the high school where I work now and another at the college where I still sometimes adjunct. I don’t think my wife and I were pregnant yet, and I don’t think I still had the marketing job I once had, but I could be wrong on both accounts.
What I do know is that it was still early in my “not working from home” career. For almost a decade, I had worked online as a copywriter, marketing coordinator, and project manager for a small to medium-sized company headquartered in Florida. I had worked at their Boston office prior to going to college, and they continued to employ me throughout my years in Vermont. But now my teaching jobs paid enough that I could give up what had become a soul-sucking experience, and I’d quit.
The issue (if there was one) was that I had been working from home for so long that I rarely felt like someone was counting on me. I worked extremely independently, and for the past year or so of my job, without a real manager; virtually every project I was assigned came with little to zero oversight, outside of the clients who ultimately had to approve it, which they almost invariably did.
But now I was a teacher. I had students who depended on me. And every single day I had to stand face to face with their expectant little eyes and ears and not only educate them, but entertain them; I needed to keep their attention long enough for them to actually get something from the experience.
It’s no wonder I suffered an anxiety attack.
The attack that started the modern era of my anxiety disorder happened in front of a room full of college students. I remember being late for class that day. I’m not often late for the classes I teach at the college, but it happens once in a while. This might have been the first time, however.
I didn’t have the panic attack before I arrived at the class, nor did I have it when I first got there. It took a while for whatever was happening in my body and brain to really come to flower, and about 40 minutes into a 45 minute class, my vision suddenly collapsed to a point: everything else was blurry. A heat wave rushed over my body, and all of my muscles tensed. Sweat broke out on the small of my back.
One of my students was standing up at her chair, reciting one of her stories. I leaned back against the metal desk and held on for dear life. “Don’t lose it,” I told myself. “They’re all looking up at you, but they have no idea what’s happening to you right now. Just hold on until she stops speaking. Just hold on.”
She came to a stop. I had no idea what she’d said or read or anything. “Okay,” I said aloud. “We’re gonna call class a little early today. Email me if you need anything.” I remember the confused look in one of my student’s eyes, but then I saw the acceptance of what I’d said, and he started packing his things to go.
I stood at the desk until everyone left the classroom, then I exhaled loudly, packed up my bag, and walked outside. “What the fuck is happening to me right now?” I thought. I could feel the insides of my arms and legs. A tingling slithered around my body like a confused and scared snake was crawling in the folds beneath my skin, up one arm, across my chest, down my belly, over my thigh, into my calf, and back up again, fast and scared and tingling, around and around and around. “What the fuck is happening to me?”
I walked to library. I thought to myself, if only I can find a place to sit, open up a book, distract myself for a second. I tried, but couldn’t do it. I ended up pacing in the back corner of the stacks.
I had another class starting in about 15 minutes, one on writing for media (rather than writing for fun). The classroom was in the basement of the library. There was no way I could lead a class full of students right now. I waited for the tingling feeling to subside, for my breathing to slow, for my heart rate to decrease. The feelings didn’t quite cease, but the climactic part of the wave had passed, and I was able to get it together long enough to go to my classroom and write on the white board in black marker that class was canceled.
At some point, and I’m not 100% sure where it happened during the day, I was standing on the patio of what is now my high school but what was then a bakery and coffee shop, and I’m talking to the doctor’s office, trying to get someone to tell me that I’m going to be all right. It might have been before I went to the library; it might have been after; but it definitely happened.
I made an appointment for later that afternoon, maybe two hours from when I made the phone call. The doctor’s office was 10 minutes to the north. My octagon was 10 minutes to the south. I didn’t want to be where I was, so I decided to drive home.
The wave struck again while I was driving. I opened the window, turned up the music. “Breathe,” I told myself aloud. “Just breathe.” I got home, ran up the three stairs of our front porch, slammed through the door (scaring the hell out of my cat), and started pacing like crazy. “Pour some water,” I said aloud. “Drink something cold.”
At some point I called my wife, who was still at her teaching job back in the town I’d just driven home from. I don’t remember what I told her, but I remember her saying that she would come to the doctor with me, and I remember, 90 minutes later, how scared she looked when she came out her school to get in the driver’s seat and take me the rest of the way to the doctor.
He listened to my story, checked me out, and at the end of everything, said to me, “It sounds like a panic attack.”
It was like a light turned on. Of course. Of course it was. I’m not dying. I just had a panic attack.
I’ve had panic attacks since then. One of them got bad enough that I called 911 on myself and had to be taken to a hospital, where after several hours of waiting, they gave me a pill and sent me home (I was more than two hours away from home; my wife had to have a friend drive her and my daughter to come get me; my baby daughter ended up puking in the car on the way home from the hospital; we had to change her on the side of the road in rural Vermont; my wife was my hero that day).
I had one at a Phish show, when I was all alone with nobody I really knew, in a distant city, with no understanding of how to get back to the place where I was staying, and no close friends in the crowd (my sister-in-law and her husband were with me at the show, but they’d left me with their friends to go get some water; I wasn’t “really” alone). I crouched down onto the ground, told myself to breathe, looked at all of the happy Phish fans around me, and repeated the mantra, “When the music comes on, everything will get better. Just keep breathing.” When the music came on, that’s exactly what happened.
I stopped worrying about my panic attacks after that. I take a prescription to help manage them, but when they come on, I know what they are, and I just wait for them to pass. They’re not pleasant, and I’m not able to detach myself from the negative sensations that accompany them, but I am able to find someplace in my mind to remember, and repeat over and over, to just keep breathing, because this too shall pass.
I have students who are crippled by their anxieties, but I try to tell them my story whenever the lesson applies, because the methods I’ve used, the resilience I’ve shown in the face of that anxiety, might just work for them.
~~
The variables that influence resilience — the variables we can control for, anyway — include:
Self-awareness: How often do you hit the pause button and think, “What’s going on with me internally right now?”
Self-regulation: Do you have the ability to change your thoughts, emotions, and physiology when what you’re experiencing isn’t helping you overcome an adverse situation?
Mental agility: Can you look at things from multiple perspectives? Can you analyze a problem down to its root and enact a set of specific solutions?
Optimism: Can you envision a positive future? Can you recognize what you can control and what you need to accept? Can you see a problem as a challenge rather than a threat, something to be leaned into with eagerness and excitement?
Self-efficacy: Do you know what your strengths are and how to apply them? Do you enter into new experiences with an “I can master this” attitude?
Connection: Do you feel safe with people, and do you have at least one person you know you can rely on, regardless of the situation? Do you feel attached to something larger than yourself, a connection that comes with a sense of spirituality or purpose?
Positive Institutions: Do you have the support of your family, community, and workplace, or do those institutions erode your ability to overcome adversity?
My story includes some of those variables. It took a while to develop a sense of self-awareness around my anxiety disorder, but now that I have it, I don’t let the potential for an attack prevent me from doing what I want or need to do.
Part of the way I overcame that fear was my ability to self-regulate. I know how to slow my breathing, how to calm myself with a mantra, how to look forward to the time when the attack will cease, and how to rationalize my way through whatever the verbal manifestation of my panic attack is telling me in my head to the point where I can consciously tell myself to relax, just relax, you’re not dying and you won’t hurt at the end of this, so relax, just relax.
My mental agility (however agile it might be) isn’t a key factor in my ability to be resilient in the face of my anxiety disorder, though I suppose it requires some mental agility to read up on the psychological theories that spring up around it and some discipline to wade through all of the new-age bullshit advice on how to deal with it.
My optimism (“This too shall pass”) and my sometimes irrational sense of self-efficacy (“I can handle this”) are huge components in my ability to be resilient, as are the connections I have in my life. Everyone in my family has been incredibly supportive (my wife most of all), as have my colleagues at school (my boss especially) and my friends near and far. I can handle this because all of these people have my back.
Of course, I’m only able to feel this optimistic because of the institutions that allowed me to get to this point, including the ultimately destructive institutions of my privilege. I have access to helpful medication and a supportive network of physicians. I have colleagues who specialize in mental health. I have an education that showed me the intrinsic rewards that come from curiosity and inquisitiveness and was also steeped in theories of consciousness, the mind, and the brain. And of course, I have a close and supportive family and community.
Whatever resilience I have, I get it because of these things. And for that, I am grateful.
I argued with my brother this weekend. It was fun. Everyone had gone to bed, and he and I went outside to smoke weed. We were in southern Maine, at a lake house that has been in my family for four generations; as my brother and I walked down to the lake, our 98-year-old grandfather, the patriarch, slept not more than thirty yards from us, tucked inside his single bed, and opposite him, his late wife’s empty bed, a symbol of our missing matriarch.
My brother and I argued under the stars, our arms leaning over the wooden rail of our deck, the water just a few feet below us. All was silent, except for our loud-ass voices. Mars was red and huge just over the treeline on the other side of the lake. Most of Pegasus still lingered on the horizon, his nightly journey having just begun.
We argued about the nature of reality, but I think my brother’s unspoken point was that he was worried about me wasting my life playing video games, reading books, and watching shows and movies. I tried to explain to him that video games (not to mention the others) are a part of life, a part of reality, one that operates in another — virtual — dimension, but one that is no less valuable for what it is, an alternative experience of space and time. I reassured him that I am quite happy with my life, and that I spend many, many, many hours a day not playing video games (or reading books or watching shows and movies). That, in fact, I spend many hours a day talking to real live people, face to face, and that I often partake in outdoor activities here in the incredibly beautiful place where I live, just minutes away from real live rivers, real live lakes, and real live mountains, where even a trip to the grocery store can be a feast for the soul.
Yes, I play video games and read books and watch shows and movies, but I’m also alive in the world, and my brother ought not to worry.
He should, on the other hand, expand his idea of the nature of reality.
During my argument, I mentioned that physicists claim (in a rigorous language I cannot, in all sincerity, understand) that reality contains more than the easily conceived dimensions of length, breadth, thickness, and duration; it may contain, according to some theoretical physicists, as many as 11 dimensions.
This is incredibly difficult to conceive, and I am not one to fully conceive it, but I do recognize the truth of it. I know what it is like to be pulled outside of oneself, to exist in a real and true way seperated enough from my physical reality to experience, at the very least, a stretching beyond the body.
That experience happens in — or at least finds its causative effects in — a different — virtual — dimension. This dimension is not exclusive to the playing of video games. We experience it when we’re listening to music and we are moved to dance. The four easily conceived dimensions of traditional reality cannot explain why a particular sequence of sound waves stimulating the follicles of our ear drums causes one’s foot to move. They cannot explain the subjective sensation of joy that floods down one’s spine at the band-supported crest of a particularly well-played guitar solo.
That experience — call it the subjective experience of the being within — exists in a completely different (though not completely seperate) dimension of reality than height, breadth, depth, and duration.
Culture and entertainment exist, and are most powerful, within that alterative dimension of reality. The evolutionary development of subjective experience has led to a scientific, engineered, and artistically influenced exploration of that dimension, turning some of “the subjective beings within” into expert creators who are capable of not only experiencing that dimension but of using tools to draw that subjective experience into the more easily experienced dimensions of reality — or what some people call, the four dimensions of “objective” reality.
This — these(?) — non-objective dimension(s) exist(s), and subjective experiences originating from these dimensions ought not to be devalued against experiences that originate on a snow-covered mountain in France. Both experiences — one originating in the subjective; one originating in the objective — are real. And both of them have value.
I hope my brother would agree with me up to this point.
Where we differ is on the question of how much, relatively speaking, each experience ought to be valued.
I suspect most people would agree with my brother that the experience of skiing down a slope at Chamonix differs not just in kind, but in value from the experience of playing a video game where you control a digitally-created avatar as it makes its way down an artistically interpreted digital version of that same slope, one that includes not just a geometrically rendered version of that slope, but also its ideal colors and sounds rendered in state-of-the-art screens and headphones and accompanied by a synchronized rumbling in your hands to simulate the rumble of the snow under your skis, all of it coming together to increase what feels like your heart rate, adrenaline, and dopamine, all while you sit on a couch in your living room, one leg hung over the edge, one leg tucked beneath you, the back of the couch swallowing you, slowly and slowly and slowly.
Yes, it is an experience that differs from skiing down the slopes of Chamonix. But it’s no less real, and in many ways, no less enjoyable. But to compare one to the other, to value one over the other, is akin to valuing the taste of chocolate over the sensation of a feather tickling your skin — they are as different as they come, and there’s no need to prefer one over the other.
There are things I’ve yet to experience in the alternative dimension of video games, books, movies, and music. Things that simply cannot compare to standing a few feet over a calm body of water on a clear, dark night, sharing some weed with a brother.
Thankfully, my subjective experience contains, and is grateful for, all of the dimensions it can get.
