ICYMI: data on Republican fiscal policy

 ICYMI, especially my Republican friends and fam: tax cuts and private investment are not the only keys to economic growth. In fact, since Reagan launched his assault in 1980 on government's role in balancing capitalist greed, these types of economic policies have been only the keys to increased deficits -- you know how much of a hole the Reagan, Bush, and Trump administrations left the economy, right? -- and increased inequality, i.e., the rise of the 1%.

The facts are that Biden's American Rescue Plan is doing its job. Not only is the economy booming, with unprecedented job growth in July (unemployment is now at 5.4%), but salaries are 4% higher. This is crucial as we should be ashamed to admit that our nation has been home for too long to many F/T, over-employed workers whose wages do not put them above the poverty line.

The new infrastructure bill -- finally passed, after much yapping and no action during the Trump admin -- is projected to create another 3 million jobs over the next 10 years. Not to mention give us better, more cost-affordable, and more universal high speed internet access, repaired roads and bridges, and more environmentally friendly technologies.

This is what government can and should be doing for us: balancing individual and corporate greed with the common good in order to increase prosperity for all -- just as FDR's and Eisenhower's administrations did during and after the Great Depression and WWII. Unregulated capitalism fails everyone but the 1%. Let's hope an increasing number of Republicans stop being obstructionists and continue to get on board with these facts and sense of common purpose to serve.

#PayAttention

#VoteSmart

#commongood

h/t Heather Cox Richardson for data

Mary of the Fishes, and Family Vacations: Part I

Mary of the Fishes
Eastport, ME 1955

My maternal grandmother Marie Elizabeth Urban Endrich -- known to all as Mary, to me as the Gram who taught me how to read and write when I was three years old -- was born in 1898 on the southwest corner of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of NYC.

It wasn't the hip village of the musical "Rent" then -- the one in which I came of age as a young adult working at the #Village Voice from 1985 - 1998.

Yet it WAS "La Vie Boheme" quite literally in regard to my great grandparents, Frantisek Urban and Aloisie Herel, who landed (separately, before meeting and marrying two years later) on the Lower East Side, along with thousands of other immigrants from Eastern Europe and beyond, fresh off the boats from Bohemia in 1892.

Mary and her two older brothers, Joseph and Frantisek, Jr., were born in that Avenue A apartment. They grew up speaking Bohemian. Frantisek was a butcher in the city. At some point, between a trip back to Czechoslovakia in 1900 and the birth of their fourth child there, Rudolf, and the 1910 census they relocated to Killingworth, CT and became a farming family on their own small farm.

These photos were taken on a family vacation to #Eastport, #Maine in 1955 and collected into a tiny paper photo album.

Mary and Richard

ALL vacations were family vacations throughout my own growing up: we never went anywhere -- Vermont, Maine, the Catskills -- without my grandmothers, all of us packed into a tiny Scottie travel trailer like so many sardines in a tin can, we children swinging in red cotton hammocks with our noses pressed against the metal ceiling, living our post-WWII best lives.

Mary and Aunt Jody

My uncle Richie, my mother's older brother, and his wife Jody took both his parents with him on many vacations -- such as this one to Eastport, on which my unmarried mother, Mae or more familiarly "Maisie," also accompanied them; as well as all the way across country by car to California a couple of years later, after my grandfather's death. 

A bear greeting my Uncle, Aunt, and Grandmother
on their first trip to Yellowstone 1957.

Richie had been previously engaged to a mystery woman of whom, along with her small terrier, I have photos but no name. She broke his heart after his return from serving at Anzio, Italy in WWII. He then married his first cousin once removed, Johanna "Jody" Herel Harris, the granddaughter of his own grandmother's sister and the third consecutive Johanna in her own family tree.

Mary is 57 in these photos -- three years younger than I am now. This is how I remember her looking: 6' tall and well over 200 pounds, with the broad features of her Slavic ancestry in which you can still see "the old country" as it was repeatedly referred to in our family -- and a bipolar lust for life from which we all benefitted and, at times, ran.

Mary Urban Endrich

On the 56th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act

 Yesterday, August 6, was the 56th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act.

As historian Heather Cox Richardson notes, we now stand at yet ANOTHER existential crisis in this country over voting rights, and whether it is the individual states or the federal government who gets to decide and to enforce our Constitution and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments which extended universal suffrage to our Black citizens.

One doesn't need to be much of a student of history to be aware of how White southerners have fought against Black equality for centuries, often using "states rights" as their justification -- including for the Civil War.

During my lifetime and yours, Black Americans have been bloodied, beaten, and killed for registering to vote, voting at all, or demonstrating for the vote. This is not even to mention being murdered while walking, running, or driving.

One doesn't need to be much of a lawyer or Constitutional scholar to understand that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments gave the federal government the power to enforce implementation of the rights they made explicit for Black Americans -- because the states had already, in the late 19th century, proven that they could find ways, including gerrymandering, to restrict these rights.

Yet over and over again, conservative White institutions -- most recently the Supreme Court lead by Republican John Roberts in the 2013 Shelby County vs. Holder case, and again this year in Brnovich v. DNC -- have stripped away voting rights and protections that ensure equal access to the ballot for those Whites seek to suppress.

White racism not only lives in the U.S., but continues actively to fight to maintain White power through decisions such as these and through current Republican state efforts to restrict voting rights.

The bottom line White Americans continue to resist is that racism is embedded in White dehumanization of Black people in order to have justified their enslavement -- and now their mass incarceration -- for White economic and social benefit.

The American history some of you don't want to learn or acknowledge is that White people committed genocide against native North American civilizations living here sustainably for more than 12,000 years in order to remove them and take their land; and then tortured, murdered, exploited, oppressed, imprisoned, and continue to discriminate against Black people in order to build the White wealth from which we ALL, rich or poor, as White people benefit.

Yours or mine or even our ancestors may not be the hands that held the whips. And still, we own homes and drive cars and get jobs and receive college loans and experience unrestricted rights thanks to a system that privileges our white skin by disadvantaging others.

Once you learn or acknowledge the reality of American history, you are then morally accountable for doing something.

Here are a few, but hardly all!, ideas for ways you can join me in this effort:

* #learnUShistory

* ensure your children and other family members learn history civics, and media literacy, and that all equally benefit from quality public education

* #stoprepublicans, who as a party are seeking to suppress Voting Rights for Black people and others of color

* donate time and/or $ to ensure everyone can and does vote #GOTV

* vote for policies and programs that provide reparations, even in seemingly small ways, for all that has been stolen from people in the making of this nation. These include tax policies that transfer wealth from the 1% to public services for all. Recognize that the amassing of such wealth does not square with the language in our Declaration of Independence or Constitution for democracy

* #acknowledgewhiteprivilege

* #sharethewealth

* #helptheneedy

Life Riddles Us

Early today, this shell appeared on the beach.

It had not been there long enough to be collected.

The shell's beauty, as it becomes lace-like, is the result, most frequently, of being riddled by the sharpened tongues of tiny carnivorous sea snails.

It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are:" [link is to a wonderful 1966 essay by the inimitable Nat Hentoff]

“But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go - we’ll eat you up - we love you so!”

The world does eat us up as it keeps us with it. Life riddles us with mysteries (carnivorous sea snail?!), pains, and pleasures that leave our faces pitted, our knees scarred, our backs twisted, our hands gnarled.

We are lucky to be consumed by the world that loves us so.

And yet: consumption is not always pleasant. We endure great suffering as we are gnashed within the teeth of this world, some more than others.

I found this shell on Third Beach in Middletown, RI, where I am for the week supporting a dear friend who, 12 years ago at age 48, was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's.

Hers is a particularly virulent form of the disease inherent to her genetic roots in the Portuguese Azores. This goes far beyond the trembling (known as dyskinesia) you can see in Katharine Hepburn's later movies. It involves a separate but related disease, known as dystonia: painful, prolonged muscle contractions that cause abnormal movements and postures and physical damage. In my friend's case, the dystonia has been breaking bones in her spine and neck, resulting in two surgeries in each area, all only somewhat successful.

My friend is a brilliant and engaged doctor of economics. The world loves her so it is eating her up, bite by bite, each bite all too apparent to the rest of us who also love her.

Life riddles us with mysteries and holes. Why her and not me? Why do our bodies fail in such painful ways? While death is an essential part of our natures, some of the routes we take to arrive there seem unnecessarily excruciating.

And then again, perhaps not. Perhaps in all our various sufferings and pains, all of the violence and anguish, the replaced joints and cancers, the divorces and abandonments and cruelties we might understand, in our battered bones, how frail and imperfect, how vulnerable we as a species are.

We could be humbled in the face of this frailty, and in our humility we might focus on how to hold these soft, vulnerable bodies, hearts and souls, and the planet of which we are but a part, with care and kindness.

Instead in so many ways we double down, ferociously keeping death at bay with one hand while with the other wreaking the very havoc that increases our suffering: murdering, raping, and pillaging not only each other but the entire planet with toxins, trash, and tactics that brutalize it, drilling millions of tiny holes in the very atmosphere meant to protect us, in the water that is our life blood. Refusing to see how these poisonous habits are the source of so many of our cancers, so much of our suffering.

It's not about someone else "out there" or a god who is not in every one of us. It's about us.

Life riddles us. Our shells are filled with tiny holes, sometimes visible, sometimes not. And rather than exulting in the wondrous mystery of it all, we pull in our heads and pretend we are not just each a tiny organism dependent on the millions around us.

The Body and the Blood

Casting a big shadow
on my first communion.

Becoming a "bride of Christ" with my Catholic first communion at age seven was a joyous occasion. I had a pretty good if unconscious affinity for myth, parable, and fable (thank you, Aesop, and Sunday school, too) but not much of a grip on metaphor so the transubstantiation was as it should be: a mystery. Honestly, that we would eat the body and blood of Christ on a regular basis makes a lot of sense if you grow up understanding that Christ is the spirit of the world -- love -- and you need to physically ingest this spirit to become and live it.

If you don't grow up with that understanding, it's possible you do not hold food as sacred; and this in turn has supported the development of a White American culture in which food is cheapened, made unhealthy for our bodies through over-processing and additives, and then wasted while too many children experience food insecurity.

You may also believe Catholics are cannibals. Or worse.

Being confirmed by the Bishop of the Diocese of Norwich, CT in 1975 at age 14 WAS worse. I had already read Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle and quite possibly Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation lurked as a stolen library book beneath my bedroom chair. The photos of my confirmation all feature me red faced and swollen from the sobbing, screaming, middle school tantrum I seemingly held right up until the moment I was standing alongside the Bishop.

I quit going to church the moment I stripped off my hand-made red sash sporting my confirmation name in honor of my beloved grandmother, Mary. I spent the next four years in my parents' home enduring not the wrath but, much worse, the quiet disappointment of my family members.

Since then, the Catholic Church has not improved much over its history of witch burnings during the Inquisition; its Doctrine of Discovery justifying the genocide of native peoples; the sexual abuse of uncountable numbers of children and the death of many more in native boarding schools; and homophobia and the myopic misogyny of its all-male priesthood and anti-abortion policies.

Yet somehow, in the face of all this and despite 30 years of Buddhist practice, I still hang my deep faith in the mysteries of this world on the Catholic liturgy of my youth -- on communion, forgiveness, love, service, congregation and praise -- and attend mass when I can.

The reconciliation of all of this -- the differences between the shame of the institution and its many lovely people and the liturgy itself -- is no small hat trick and keeps me hard at work.

Let me just give you this. During my radical lesbian separatist heyday in the early 1990's, when I was employed by The Village Voice and also an editor for TRIVIA: A Journal of Ideas and Firebrand Books, my mother would take the train from Mystic to visit me in Brooklyn every Mother's Day. One morning I woke up to find her reading one of my issues of TRIVIA, which was crammed with lesbian-feminist philosophers, artists, and theorists including the likes of Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin. Later that afternoon as we were walking down a shady block of 6th Avenue past a beautiful old Romanesque Catholic church which many Haitian immigrants attended, I asked her if she still went to church every week as she insisted we did throughout my childhood.

Mae shook her head. "The Church is just something created by men, right?" she asked me. "And they change the rules all the time. I feel closer to God in my raspberry patch."

#transubstantiation

#communion

#lesbiannation

#rubyfruitjungle

#reconciliation

#liturgy