The Slippery Longings of Crises

Last Sunday I found myself pulling out my mother's 1938-vintage Hamilton-Beach stand mixer to make some banana bread. 

Who can believe this damn thing still works. But it does, with its two white Pyrex bowls and a crumbling cord no doubt leaking asbestos covering across my counter.

This is no Vita Mix. It needs some help creaming butter and sugar together, scraping the sides of the bowl toward the beaters, unclogging the beaters which...just don't go fast enough. It's not that they've slowed down. It's that things just didn't go as fast in those days.

In the six years since she died a month before turning 91, I've been surrounded by a lot of my mother's stuff. My brother, a local garbage hauler who had loyally and miraculously lived with and cared for our diabetic parents until each of their deaths, had run up some debts and could not afford to keep the house. We had to empty and sell it. Our parents had lived in that same cheaply built tract house in Mystic, CT for 41 years at that point. Previous to that, they had resided in the house they built for themselves, with heavy plaster walls and an ocean of front lawn on land my maternal grandmother had given them next door to her own, for only 16 years before moving to Mystic to follow my father's entrepreneurial dreams.

Yes, those cereal canisters in the background of this photo were my mother's too.

Finding myself making banana bread with my mother's mixer caused wave after wave of longing for my parents and my grandmothers to crash over me: for times when I, an adopted child, was secure and loved and cherished by the strangers who took me in. Blessed.

That's how everyone wants and deserves to feel right now: secure and loved and cherished.

And very few do. The COVID-19 pandemic has us quarantined in our separate homes, many, especially elders, fighting the ills of social isolation. As I write this, almost 4,000 people A DAY are dying from COVID here in the U.S. alone. And all around the world, people continue to die not only from the pandemic but from violence, starvation, grief. Many try to flee the horrific circumstances in which they find themselves, refugees seeking better lives just as my biological French ancestors did emigrating first to Quebec and then across the border to the U.S. But we, the wealthiest nation in the world, essentially closed our borders and wallets to refugees under the Trump administration.

It's possible that Trump himself and his "base" feel the least secure, loved, and cherished. They sure act that way. Their white male "politics of resentment" is right from the playbook of the insecure. Like the Confederacy before them who fought to keep Black people enslaved in their service, these fellows' insecurity about losing their white privilege and power becomes aggression against the rest of us. The fragility of their white masculinity is on display for the world to see.

Change is tough, and to achieve equity those of us with privilege -- whether skin color, education, gender, or economics -- are all gonna have to give up something. We need to use government to do what it does best: bring us into the commons where we can figure out the difficult solutions that will best serve the most of us, and in particular those with the least among us.

It would be easier to feel compassion for these angry white men if they were not so hateful, armed, and violent.

In the meantime: we have to hold them accountable for themselves not cherishing those around them. Not the women, girls, boys, people of color, or legislators with whom they differ. They are operating under the misperception perpetrated by Trump: that their government supports their incivility. They are wrong, and our government now needs to hold them accountable for their uncivil, illegal behaviors. Only after they realize they are NOT supported can we start to urge them toward healing.

My mother never made a banana bread from scratch her life. She was a fan of Duncan Hines and Pillsbury prepared mixes, and produced unmessy, perfectly even, black-speckled little breads every time.

Mine, on the other hand, is densely filled with banana mash and walnuts.

A fine example of plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Sunday Morning Observances: We Belong Together

 

Woke up at 4 am with Nina Simone in my head.

"It's a new dawn, it's a new day, and I'm feeling..."

How AM I feeling? How are YOU feeling?!

On my end: the divisiveness of the country has me truly disheartened. 

Yesterday, Trump’s motorcade drove through a far right, white supremacist crowd (have you seen the photos of the many Nazi and Confederate flags that flew above them? I don't want to do them the honor of reprinting here, but it was appalling) on his way to ... yep. You got it. Play golf.

Our lame duck president is not working to manage the growing pandemic, nor to shore up our economy being damaged by his lack of management. Instead he is playing golf, while actively encouraging these segregationists -- he is encouraging our civil division even as his many lawsuits are tossed out by the courts. He refuses to concede and continues to lie about the election and stall the transition to the Biden administration. Even worse, one of his former officials--one at the heart of the Russia investigation no less, tweeted, “The military is with the president.” 

Luckily for us, they're not. Trump's pants must be on fire with so many lies, which is why he is mostly keeping out of view and not working.

We belong together: fighting for justice for all after centuries of oppression.

Our nation does not deserve white supremacists stoking another civil war as they did in the 1850's. These are, historically, the same people as the Constitutional originalists--in fact, according to historian Heather Cox Richardson, this was one of the strategies they promoted at the time. Government could not act, could not even build bridges or roads, unless it was written in the Constitution. Because if government DID take these actions, it would build a thriving economy APART FROM their system of enslavement.

A strong government serving all people takes power from the enslavers.

The parties have flipped--Lincoln's Republican Party was formed in OPPOSITION to these white supremacist southern Democrats--but the strategies remain similar. Our modern Republican Party now represents the slaveholders' legacy, as well as the interests of the 1% who hold the majority of our nation's wealth.

They don't want government support to repair and to grow a thriving economy independent of their white male interests.

So with this historical schism very much alive and well 200 years on, we're witness to a peaceful transition of power being stonewalled by those who desperately want to keep power for themselves.

I'm asking myself, and I ask you: what are we called to do in these short, impermanent lives that we have been given?

What actions will we take today, tomorrow, next week, to best serve others and not just ourselves?

How will we continue to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice?

Sunday Morning Observances: Healing the Resentful and Aggrieved

 

It's an unusually sunny and warm day beginning the second week of November in Maine.

Some of my feeling of light and warmth has to do with the hope that washed across much of the nation last night, as we celebrated the election of Joe Biden as President and the first woman and first person of color, Kamala Harris, as Vice President.

Kamala appropriately wore white in a nod to the suffragettes who, 100 years ago this year, succeeded in passing the 19th Amendment and gaining white women the right to vote.

Black women wouldn't have the same for another 45 years, until the Voting Rights Act. Yet as Kamala so gracefully said, "I'm the first women elected Vice President and I won't be the last."

And even as I celebrate, I know that while we the people have voted that we no longer wish to be led by a man who lies, breaks the law, divides us, and serves only himself -- another 70 million of us feel this man's actions represent the American way.

As Joe Biden noted, this is really a battle for the soul of our nation. It is about the culture of our country.

Will we allow ourselves to be divided, ever angry at persons who either look different from us or hold different beliefs? Always fearful of what we are losing, rather than what we gain together? Can we rediscover values that we share?

I look around at family, friends, and communities and I hear and see and feel the resentment. The aggrievement is real. We cannot afford to dismiss or ignore it. We need to fix the roots of this toxicity at the very heart of the U.S.

For far too long we have allowed -- as a people, as a culture -- money, land, and the racism and privilege that accompany these to become our nation's bully pulpit.

We as Americans hate to admit we suffer from the same diseases that are the scourge of world politics. Racist oligarchs everywhere such as Trump on both left ("big tech," "the media") and right ("big oil," "Wall St.") -- those who have inherited and wish to maintain white wealth and power -- benefit from dividing us and deepening the oppression of many for the benefit of the few.

And yet as Americans we have an advantage, when we choose to use it, over some of our global brothers and sisters -- we still have a free and fair vote to express our voices.

This election demonstrates it is time for us to unite in our opposition to wealth inequality: to the 1% and the culture and policies that enable and sustain it.

Because democracy cannot be sustained with as many resources in the hands of so few white people.

A quick reminder of the data: As of 2014, the wealthiest 1% of Americans possessed 40% of the nation's wealth; the rest of us, in the bottom 80%, owned 7%. The gap between the wealth of the top 10% and that of the middle class is over 1,000%; that increases another 1,000% for the top 1%. The average employee "needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO earns in one hour."

This wealth gap DOES divide us. It should not be surprising to us that so many are so open to a politics of division and resentment. We dismiss these feelings to our own peril.

And now, for the second time this century, Democrats are being asked to step in and fix a giant Republican-made mess.

The policies of resentment and aggrievement have allowed the current administration to destabilize the economy by tax cuts to the wealthy which have underfunded our common needs, such as infrastructure and education; destabilize public health by underfunding and not managing our response to the pandemic; destabilize the environment by rolling back protections designed to reduce the harm to our families and economies caused by climate change; destabilize our democracy by alleging voter fraud where there is none; destabilize our communities and our future by feeding racist fear and fury designed to drive us apart over race, gender, wealth, and more.

Our nation is unstable and reeling. We find ourselves in desperate need of policies and rhetoric that bring us together rather than tear us apart.

We need policies and rhetoric that recognize the parts of our culture, like the obsession with white-held, individual wealth over diverse community good, that really do divide us.

We need to do the hard work and take the small steps, one at a time, to get us out of the pit into which our democracy has been sinking over the last four years.

Joe Biden, a decent man committed to serving the public good for more than 40 years, and Kamala Harris, representing the future of this country, will need every bit of support from us -- they need ALL of us to, as Biden asked in his speech last night, "give each other a chance."

#uniteagainstfear #endweathinequality 

Talley's Folly at Portland Stage: It's...LIVE. And it moved me to tears

Once upon a time, sitting in a dark theater close upon others and watching even more other humans interact on stage -- making music, making art, making drama, making beauty -- was a regular part of my life: of many of our most privileged lives. Recently, thanks to an unchecked/unmanaged pandemic in this country, we've had to settle for the performances made available to us in our private homes, on our screens.

Until you are back in the room with an audience and artists, it is difficult to describe the layers of humanity we are missing in these electronic interactions.

Kudos to Portland Stage for having the courage to lead us back together with its current production of Talley's Folly by Lanford Wilson.

As a fellow arts administrator who has worked with the actors' and stage unions, as well as with the public, I know Executive and Artistic Director Anita Stewart had to move mountains to make this happen.

Lucky for us, she did. In old fashioned reviewer terms: run, do not walk, to see this production. 

Not only will you get to see a wonderfully acted and staged live performance, you'll get to feel safe as part of an audience with others. Because everything Portland Stage does around this production is geared toward keeping us safe so we can carry on together in this new normal.

For carry on we must. It is not only grocery store and health care workers that are essential to our health. It's artists. And theaters. And musicians. And the big hearted, generous, earth shaking humanity of sharing live performance. We are not creatures of social isolation. We ARE creatures of INNOVATION -- especially artists. It is our job to figure this thing out. And figure it out we are -- with Portland Stage and Talley's Folly helping to lead the way.

Thank you.

In terms of the performance itself, I'll admit to some prejudices. I'm lucky to be friends and colleagues with the actors and director, Dave Mason, Kathy McCafferty, and Sally Wood. And they all do a wonderful job bringing forward a classic from set in the Ozarks in the mid-20th century to our modern New England ears. And Anita, doubling down as she often does as scenic designer, knocked herself out by giving us a set with...water. 

How magic is that? -- Answer: it always is, to see a river replicated live on stage.

Dave does an incredible job with a big role -- lots of language, lots of trickiness, PLUS some great physical acting (ice skates!) all wrapped up in a unique Lanford Wilson character that belongs so much to the WWII era. Ostensibly a romantic comedy, Talley's Folly tackles capitalism and anti-Semitism as it goes.

But the killer for me was much more personal. In the climactic scene, Sally Talley's secret is revealed. It is a secret my own adopted mother shared [SPOILER ALERT]: not being able to have children and, at that time, being thereby considered un-marriageable. 

It's a different world today, with so many options for women to have children, so I don't mind giving up that spoiler. But seeing Kathy/Sally wracked with pain, doubled over live before me on that stage -- brought home to me, with a stab to my gut, what my own adopted mother must have felt like and endured. Until, like Sally Talley, she met my Dad: her prince for nearly 50 years, precisely because he said, "No problem. We'll adopt."

Thank you, Dave, Kathy, Anita, Sally, and the rest of the Portland Stage crew. For giving me that and other moments of emotion, of our shared humanity, safely in our new normal.

Sunday Morning Observances: On Voting, Faith, and Compassion

The synchronicity of Election Day with All Saints/All Souls/Day of the Dead...

For many of us, we know and feel these times to be especially sacred: a moment when the boundaries "thin" between the living and our beloved dead...we remember them, we pay them tribute, we give them thanks, we call their names. We place marigolds around their photos.

It is this same faith in the love of the world that drives me and many others to vote. As the Franciscan father Richard Rohr has written, "voting is a deeply moral act—a decisive statement of Christian faith that I matter, that justice matters, and that other people matter."

It's the "other people matter" part of his statement from which many seemingly religious people have become disconnected. As Rohr goes on to note, many "Christians" do not connect their inner, "heaven focused" world with our collective economic, social, or political life.

There are, all too obviously and amost recently with our Supreme Court hearings, many strains of Catholicism. I was lucky enough to have been raised in the type that understand's Jesus's teachings as a message of social justice for all. Like Rohr, I ask myself: "how can I be good for the sake of my neighborhood, my city, my church, my community, and the world? It really is a different starting place. It’s not seeking my own ego enhancement, but the spiritual and physical well-being of others, as Jesus did."

As feminists we learned: the personal is the political. "There really is no such thing as being non-political. Everything we say or do either affirms or critiques the status quo. Even to say nothing is to say something. If we say nothing, we communicate that the status quo—even if it is massively unjust and deceitful—is apparently okay."

My faith means that public virtue is about solidarity with others -- not just about my own ego, well-being, greed, or "private sense of 'holiness.'"

Today, on All Souls' Day and in loving memory of my grandmothers, mother, and god mother, I challenge my fellow Christians who consider themselves to be "pro life" and are single issue, anti-abortion voters: what can you DO to improve the lives of women and children so that safe, legal abortion continues on the decreasing path on which it has been? How can YOU hold men accountable for their sexuality and violence? How can YOU ensure we as women have control over our bodies through full access for all to effective birth control? How can YOU vote for a compassionate world, in which poor and starving and abandoned and separated children are well cared for once they enter this world?

This is the work to be done: to VOTE FOR A COMPASSIONATE WORLD in which all are called to serve, and all are called to care. Not about your own self interest: rather, about those who struggle the most and are the most vulnerable. If you think of your vote from this perspective, your choice will be absolutely clear.

Vote like OUR LIVES depend on it: because they do.

#allsaintsday #AllSoulsDay #dayofthedead #GOTV #yourvoicematters #EveryVoteCounts