History Has Its Eye on Us -- but WTF is "History"?

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Congress.

An insurrectionist attempt to overthrow our government, led not by immigrants or wage laborers or formerly enslaved people or foreign terrorists but by the white male President who had just been voted out.

Same guy who almost 50% of the country appears to support for re-election.

I am surprised that this somber "anniversary" was not more well marked -- in the mainstream media, or on social.

As writer and philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, in a quote that bears frequent repetition, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I worry almost incessantly about our nation's lack of historical education. 

American philosopher and educator John Dewey published Democracy and Education over 100 years ago, in 1916. Yet his thoughts on the critical role of public education in modeling, building and sustaining democratic freedoms remain relevant today. He wrote:

"The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience."

We are all equal as learners and learn best together in communities of other interested learners. This is why the U.S. institution of free public education for all -- once unique in the world -- is so entwined with universal suffrage.

If you don't know and you can't learn, your vote is meaningless -- or worse.

With the nation's divisions and acrimony heating up as we careen toward the 2024 election, in few areas is our need to deepen our understandings of the past more critical than in our how we view the institutions and contexts that launched the nation's first -- and we hope only -- Civil War.

Because many of these same dynamics and tensions continue to plague U.S. society.

I was so aware of this in a recent visit to the new International African American Museum in Charleston, SC.

Schools are not the only, nor even, for many, the best learning communities.

Located on Gadsden's Wharf where an estimated 40% of African captives entered this country, this Museum "honors the untold stories of the African American journey at one of our country's most sacred sites:" documenting "a journey that began in Africa centuries ago, and still continues today" -- shaping every aspect of our world.

The Museum surrounds visitors with the African diaspora, immersing you in vivid, side-by-side examples of the ways African cultures are alive in today's U.S. music, art, design, fashion, food, and more. These cultures differ so dramatically from western European cultures that one can sense the tension between them even on the museum floor.

Did you know that white Europeans became the minority population in South Carolina, where the Civil War was launched, as early as 1708?

South Carolina planters' envious duplication of British systems of brutal enslavement to cultivate sugar cane in Barbados created the state's huge reliance on enslaved labor to develop its "Carolina Gold" -- rice -- and thus its enthusiastic participation in the trade of enslaved peoples.

Yet South Carolina's former governor, Nikki Haley, now also a Republican presidential candidate, could not accurately answer a question regarding the causes for the Civil War, nor why her state was the first to secede from the Union.

The story in which the Museum immerses its visitors is one of both triumph AND trauma.

We as white Americans too often don't know or disregard the degree of trauma the enslaved ancestors of today's African-American population endured. And we avert our faces from their continued economic, political, and social oppression. At the same time, we aren't well learned enough about the triumphs of innovation and ingenuity and resistance that helped these same people to survive and to extend the legacy of African cultures into the U.S.

I continue to seek out these voices and experiences in multiple ways. I believe we need to immerse ourselves in understanding the experiences that make up the fierce, jagged mosaic of this nation.

As several of the exhibits noted: despite every effort to annihilate, enslave, and oppress African Americans in the U.S. -- they are STILL HERE. Still determinedly connected to place. Still honoring their ancestors, their ancestry, and the land they have had continuously to fight for.

On the anniversary of January 6, with a Presidential election looming -- I urge you to go, and to take your children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and students, to the International African American Museum in Charleston. Or to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Or to read a novel by Jessmyn Ward. Or to watch the award-winning movie, 12 Years A Slave, based on the true story of an African-American man born into freedom who was kidnapped and sold as a slave.

Experience the brutality, the greed, the trauma and denial and triumph on which large parts of U.S. culture -- including Trump's MAGA movement -- are erected.

Educate yourself and others deeply before you vote.

"I think it's important that every institution in this county, every American, take the responsibility of upholding democracy seriously. And everyone needs to be doing everything that they can to ensure that a) Donald Trump does not succeed and b) the MAGA movement is extinguished."

-- Michael Fanone, a Capitol police officer whom the January 6 insurrectionists beat and tasered, causing both a heart attack and traumatic brain injury, quoted in Politico

#january6

#democracy

#africanamericanhistory

#survival

#insurrection

#newblogpost 

Our Great White Whales and the Lighting of the World

It's easy to see why Herman Melville's classic 19th century novel is so widely taught -- even in mostly abbreviated forms for contemporary readers.

The metaphor of the monstrous white whale that is the peg-legged whaling captain's obsession is an allegory on multiple levels for the culture of natural resource extraction and wealth accumulation White male colonizers brought to North America.

The Seaman's Beth-El in New Bedford,
made famous in the 1957 film
Moby Dick, dir. by John Houston

The magnificent mammals remain large in our imaginations, and continue to cause controversy in our waters, where nearly two centuries after the heyday of whaling in 1850 they remain endangered -- and as a culture we continue to play out our guilt and remorse upon their bodies.

I grew up up river from the Mystic Seaport -- home to the whaling ship Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship in the world -- racing the seine boats used by the harpoon teams. And still, until a recent trip to New Bedford, MA, I never understood the role of the whaling industry in U.S. culture.

Whaling preceded petroleum. It brought "first light" to people for whom the earth's first light was not enough -- unlike North America's east coast indigenous peoples, the Wabanaki and the Wampanoag, who were both named as those who greeted the first light. 

As with petroleum, whale oil made the ship owners wealthy and the whalers themselves not.

As with petroleum, that wealth and the near extinction of a species (sperm whales) was and continues to be fueled by our desire for (literal) "creature comforts."

300,000 whales were hunted by sail in the century roughly spanning the late 1700's to the end of the 19th century. But in the 20th century alone, with the introduction of diesel-powered engines, millions more were killed, with the total estimated at almost 2.9 million by the time international law and treaties ended the international hunts in the 1990's.

Now our nation is scrambling to reverse the damage wrought by the whaling industry.

Now our nation is thinking about ways to slow the damage wrought to our planet by the petroleum industry.

Now we need to think about the ways our demands as consumers for a certain "quality of life" is driving our world to extinction.

New Bedford is just one of many places that can enlighten us.

#newblogpost

Interdependence Day and Radical Hospitality

July 4, 2019 with our peonies and beloved people.

On July 4, whether you live on a small island off the coast of Maine/Wabanaki Territory as I do or not, wouldn't it be nice if we all were reflecting on and celebrating radical hospitality?!

The radical hospitality of kinship -- which by definition goes beyond blood, as I know well from my own experience as both a queer and an adopted person -- is core to the teachings of Jesus in my faith tradition. In both my tradition and experience, we are ALL adopted by god and, if we are lucky, by each other.

Whether or not we open our hearts to each other to live within this tradition is another story. It does too often seem as if there are a lot of Sunday church goers and Bible thumpers out there who extend hospitality only within their own four walls.

Why consider radical hospitality, and kinship that extends beyond blood, on the 4th of July?

We cannot celebrate independence without celebrating inter-dependence. Mutuality. We are all family.

Yes, love your family -- within the context we are ALL family (who dance together!).

We are raised in a culture of mistakes. Of celebrating independence, and our victories over stolen lands. This White colonialism we call "American" is seeped like blood into this stolen earth. Land that was once stewarded sustainably for thousands of years and has now been pillaged.

This same culture wants us to believe that "charity" is radical hospitality.

It is not.

Radical hospitality is not about any one of us making charitable donations to ease our guilt over harboring more than our share of the earth's resources. It is not about hosting dinner parties and galas. Most importantly, it is not about seeing others as in need of your largesse.

Radical hospitality is about mutuality. We all stand side by side on this earth together. Those who are without homes or family or food or services or health or mental health and those who have all of this and more -- so they can travel. Be tourists. Have second homes.

We are all family. Everyone must be welcomed, everyone cared for. Not just into our communities and homes. But into our hearts.

When we allow and welcome people and ideas who are strange and other and even scary to us into our hearts, we begin to transform ourselves and our own corner of the world. Could a "hospitality of the heart" -- one that moves beyond judgement, sarcasm, and meanness -- change our communities and our world? I believe so. It is why gathering together for a performance -- whether theater or church -- is so crucial to who we are as humans. In those spaces, together, we create the opportunities for these transformations of the heart. We prepare our hearts. We open them to lives and stories we might not otherwise encounter or welcome in our isolation.

2013: driving the theater float, with beloved
actors, in the local July 4 parade.

For those of us who do live in towns flooded by tourists and visitors at this time of year, radical hospitality can be particularly challenging right now! Some notes to our visitors, in addition to myself: remember you are privileged to be here, and find some humility in that privilege. For me, personally, the entitlement that often accompanies privilege can be the characteristic in strangers most difficult for me (or my community) to welcome. You are standing beside us, not above us. And none of us is entitled to more than any other.

Interdependence. Mutuality. Radical Hospitality. Wishing all a July 4th filled with these things.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning is a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
[S]he may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi

Read more about radical hospitality through the lens of Black queer kinship and Marlon Riggs' 1989 film, Tongues Untied.

The Peculiar Power of Pride

I've really struggled with Pride in 2023. 

Our Pride flag this year...

June 23, when I drafted this post, was my parents' wedding anniversary.

My mother would have been 100 years old this year. Thirty-four years old at the time of their wedding, they were a later-in-life marriage for their generation. My mother's inability to bear children of her own was related to her "unmarriage-ability" in the 1950's. A different world, difficult to imagine today.

They were married for 46 years before my father died in 2003.

When I came out to myself at age 14 in 1975, I never thought I'd see gay marriage in my lifetime.

I was 38 when I married my partner in 1999.

Our wedding on Crockett Cove in Deer Isle, ME
1999

I've now been out as a lesbian for almost 50 years and married for 24 of those.

A queer woman: a woman who maintains her femaleness while claiming male power and privilege. Neither she nor he. Still too often, although not as often, the only woman in the room where it happens. A woman who might be mistaken for a man because she insists on retaining her female identity while ignoring the tropes of female beauty and femininity: tropes defined by and created in response to and to please men.

I feel so much pride in and amazement over the changes we've fought to achieve. PRIDE is now EVERYONE's celebration! for a whole month! A flag for every business! So many gay people with dollars to spend! We're here, we're queer, we're everywhere! Oh, and we celebrated. We danced. Did we ever dance. On every street on every pier in every bathroom. Carving out the spaces in which ALL sexuality is ok.

Note to straight women: you all owe that to queer people.

For me, however, PRIDE was always a riot and a march and a protest as well as a party.

We had discrimination and bias, hate and violence to protest then, and we have the same to protest now.

What I continue to be amazed at is how enduring anti-queer and anti-woman biases are, particularly in their more subtle and personally toxic forms. But this shouldn't really be shocking, given the persistence of racism/classism/sexism -- the underpinnings of our White male dominant culture -- in and across all our lives.

Just as we had Anita Bryant in the 1970's working to convince all orange juice drinkers that queer people are subversive to the traditional family and dominance of men (she was right!) today's radical right is trying to turn back the tide on our gender revolution. But today so many more of us are plural, it's easy, within some contexts, to laugh about: outlaw DRAG shows? Seriously.

But lord, it is tiresome. Our straight "allies" don't recognize how tiresome it is. And the danger of constantly dealing with the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of disrespect, toxicity, and assault -- the micro-aggressions -- by those privileged by the dominant culture is especially real for our queer youth, who continue to commit suicide at much higher levels than others in our culture.

I'm 62 and still feeling it.

And it's not just "out there." I experience all kinds of implicit bias and disrespect every day, including subtle but damning disrespect for my 26-year relationship.

You could say I have PTSD from coming of age during the AIDS years in NYC. And that's true: I do. 

Film still from United In Anger:
A History of ACT UP directed
by Jim Hubbard

Who wouldn't? We were living in a holocaust of friends, comrades, lovers dying every day -- and often we had no familial or legal rights to even visit them in the hospital.

We used that tragic holocaust to change many of those legal issues.

But 35 years later, we often find ourselves confronted by what Lakota playwright Larissa Fasthorse calls "performative wokeness:" "good" people who benefit in one way and / or others from the dominant culture -- white people, wealthy people, men, straight women -- and generally claim to be supportive of the rights of queer people -- until they have to ACT respectfully. Until they have to treat our relationships with the same degree of respect and privacy -- and tolerance for them being less-than-perfect -- as they treat heterosexual relationships.

While laws and procedures have changed, the implicit biases creeping about beneath that smooth surface feed the toxicity that has long been internalized in our queer selves: that there can be no "significant other" in a relationship between two women. Just as in the past, there are times when I am treated more as a roommate who must be tolerated than a primary partner. Or when I am merely invisible because I am not a man. Or when people talk about "anger" (read: justifiable fury at oppression) and "control" (read: a woman taking power over her own life) as if they are negative attributes only men are justified in displaying.

While I'm not surprised by these subtleties of disrespect, they still hurt -- and anger -- me.

I can feel how it would make things easier for me to participate in the boom of trans-men and claim male and heterosexual privileges. Give up on the in-between. The QUEER revolution for which we hope and work -- in which one can be both/and -- is still very much a work in progress. Especially for women.

There are always some who want to make this an issue of "mutual respect." But there can't be "mutuality" when power structures remain unbalanced. Equality can't exist before equity.

I don't need to and won't further entitle with my individual respect those who are already privileged. If they really are as "woke" as they claim to be, they need to go out of their way, do their work, examine their consciences, acknowledge societal structures of power, and privilege MY queer life and relationship. This is not a two-way street in which everyone starts from the same starting line. That's the ideal for which we are still fighting.

Words alone can be painfully empty. Friends, siblings, children too often merely perform their "wokeness" for those of us who are gender queer. And it's when the rubber hits the road -- when your long-term partner is ill and enmeshed with the medical establishment for their survival -- that the depths of this performance really matters. And blessedly, on the professional end -- thanks in large part to the too many who lost their lives to AIDS -- this performance has really changed.

I am grateful for that.

So Happy Pride. I hope you all will join me in continuing to fight like hell.

#happypride
#fightlikehell
#queerwomen
#lesbian 
#misogynystillexists
#EndThePatriarchy

The Other Half

I recently traveled by car, train, and bus to Florida to provide health care support for some friends.

I thought about my Dad a lot while there, because he loved it so.

He didn't subjectively love it: as in, there were all these favorite places and people he was eager to see each winter.

No, Evert Hjalmer Nelson -- only son of Signe who immigrated from central Sweden to New Britain, CT, when she was 17 to help her sister, who was ill, raise twin girls -- OBJECTIVELY loved Florida because of what it represented to him.

Climbing aboard the mid-size motor home he and my mom first rented, and later purchased; and hitting I-95 south for Florida for several winters in the 1980s - 1990s meant, to my dad, that he had "made it."

He'd achieved one of his lifelong goals: to be a guy who could afford to spend part of his winter in the warmth of the South rather than battling the coastal ice of New England.

Like the motor home itself, the place they landed every winter was very modest: Woodsmoke Campgrounds in Fort Myers, on the Gulf Coast. Because it wasn't really "the South" in which they were interested. It was Florida, very much its own nation-state in White American culture.

Evert Hjalmer and Mae Louise Nelson
circa 1980's

Woodsmoke is directly on the "main drag," the infamous Tamiami Trail ribboning south along the coast from Tampa and then cutting across the Everglades to Miami. I don't remember how they ended up at Woodsmoke, but it became a place both he and my mother loved. Dad could ride his oversized tricycle around the park; Mom paddled around the pool, walked the camp loop and made a few friends. They forewent the omnipresent shuffleboard (I've never known anyone who played, although having shuffleboard seems, in those days, to have increased the camping appeal) and stuck mainly to their slab of concrete and picnic table. The one time I visited them there the whole place was very neat and tidy. No mud, no puddles laced with thin ice.

This winter pursuit was a bit of a busman's holiday. My Dad's other big dream, the one of many that had resulted in this big dream, was to a) quit the machine factory in which he was working on my arrival b) own his own business that was preferably c) a franchise (this was the 1960's, we were in awe and desirous of McDonalds) and, ideally d) a KOA (Kampgrounds of America) campground.

Here is one of the big gifts my Dad gave to me: he was a dreamer who actually pursued and obtained this creative dreams.

Very cool.

And like any first generation, mid-20th century veteran of World War II, a good number of Dad's dreams had to do with attaining what other guys had, and this of course had a lot to do with what was pitched to them and what privilege they had as White men in the post-war era. A house with a (small) yard in the (white) suburbs rather than the rooming house in Connecticut's "Hardware City" in which he had grown up: a completely multicultural place whose tool factories drew workers arriving from Sweden and especially Poland. After World War II, Puerto Rican immigrants were recruited to fill a labor shortage in the tobacco fields of the Connecticut River valley, and by the 1970's the demographic had shifted to that New Britain and Hartford now have some of the largest per capita percentage of Puerto Rican people of any cities in the U.S.

Other aspect of Dad's post-war dreams: being the boss of his own business. Cars, decidedly plural. Boats, same.

My dad was fascinated by and envious of how "the other half," as he called them, lived.

He liked to drive through neighborhoods with bigger houses than ours. He and my mom would go out for dinner by picking up a takeout burger and motoring down to Stonington Point (CT) where they could watch the beautiful sail and motor boats go by. It was kind of like a pre-internet shopping trip for my dad as he decided what boat he wanted to buy in the future: that far away and mostly imaginary day when he might have the means. Or they would grab a pizza and take my brother and I, and sometimes aunts and uncles and cousins, to sit at a picnic table at a rest stop on Interstate 95 so my dad could count the campers going by. In retrospect, I suppose this constituted some form of market research.

When realized, our own campground in Mystic was scraped together in 1970 from a gravel pit. Like much about their adult lives, I have no memory of how my dad connected with his partners -- Woody, who owned the land and the bulldozing equipment to make it into a campground; and George, the thin, sharp-faced lawyer, maybe the one who financed and brokered the deal? -- but there we were, by 1971, having moved 25 miles east down the coast from the mouth of the Connecticut River where my mother, and then we, had been born and raised.

We went as a family twice to Florida during February vacation: because that's how "the other half" lived, by my Dad's definitions, and he wanted, and worked hard for, that "better life" for his family as well. In kind of the same way he wanted us to have the college educations neither he nor my Mom had.

Going to Florida was a big deal. My parents didn't fly (or ever have credit cards), so we had to be gone for at least two weeks, which meant my brother and I had to miss a week of school in addition to vacation week. After some soul-searching and minor arguments between them on the merits of this, they took the plunge anyway.

Year #1: camping outside Disney World, not long after it opened and pre- any other associated theme parks. The monorail! Going through the fancy hotel at which we could not afford to stay! Pretty magical.

Year #2: a tiny rented houseboat on the Intracoastal Waterway. Pretty harrowing.

That first trip to Disney was kind of de rigeur -- i.e., "everyone" was going, now that we had access on the east coast to the "wonderful world" which had opened in 1971, the same year as the campground. The second and last trip the four of us took together was more of a family tragi-comedy.

I was 14 that year, as in: a ninth grader who was not happy about being dragged away from my basketball team, music, and friends. It was 1975, the U.S. appeared to be falling apart as our last troops were evacuated in a panic from Saigon following on the President's impeachment and resignation and the Watergate trials, Captain & Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" was the #1 song and I wanted to believe it desperately about one of the first girls for whom I had a self-identified crush. As in: if I went away, she would forget me. Out of sight, out of mind. No cel phones, no email, no texting.

Despite having an angry, unabashedly surly teenager in tow my Dad decided the best option was to put us all aboard a houseboat and float us away from any chance we had on land to escape each other. In retrospect, this choice had nothing at all to do with us and everything with fulfilling another of Dad's Dreams.

And, in perfect metaphorical fashion, he ran the boat aground on a sand bar.

We could have just waited for the tide to come in which, in fact, we ultimately were forced to do.

But that was after hours of Dad, inexplicably in his extra large whitey-tighty underwear, and me in my swim suit jumping in and out of the very warm, very shallow water, heaving our combined weights at the boat while our feet sheared out from under us on the sandy bottom, and screaming at each other in frustration, blame and filial anger.

By the time we motored back and I was able to jump to the dock, I never wanted to see Florida or how "the other half" lived, at least in Dad's imagination, ever again.

New development in Sarasota County, FL

Almost 50 years later, the dreams Dad shared with others of his generation -- the White, U.S., what-was-then-the-middle class dream in which you get a car, you get a car, you get a second home, you get a boat, you get a vacation, you get a vacation, etc., the impact of which was then inflated with each handoff to the next generation -- has overwhelmed Florida and is the engine of desire perpetuating our culture's widening gulf between the "have's" and "have not's."

Like California's, like Texas's, Florida's roads are nearly impassably clogged with vehicles. In Sarasota alone, 20,000 new building permits have been issued and three story elevator shafts, to facilitate living spaces now mandated to be 13 feet above ground to prevail over the king tides of climate change, lurch from the muddy, bulldozed remains of the Florida scrub like so many extraterrestrial gophers.

Most of us raised as members in White American culture have been, for the most part, "trained to obtain" since birth, especially when it comes to property and other material goods already owned or obtained by others. Our colonist ancestors wanted the land/beaver/trees/labor/wealth those resident on this continent had, and every generation since we've strived to obtain that material definition of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If someone else can have it, why not I?

I've had to wrestle with this monster ever since leaving the campground and attending Bowdoin College: a realization of another of Dad's Dreams, to have college-educated children who could more easily attain and experience how "the other half" lived. But once I landed at this small, elite institution populated by the children of some of the U.S.'s wealthiest and most powerful citizens, the gulf between those "have's" and me and my family proved too dangerously wide to cross. The few times my parents ventured onto campus, Dad was stricken by horrible migraines and had to hide from all social events in my dorm room.

Now, as I witness the gentrification of the small, Downeast Maine island I have called home for almost 25 years -- watching as the urban wealthy buy multiple homes and invest in rental properties to acquire more wealth while gutting our community by reducing workforce housing -- I sometimes feel as if I am standing on a sandbar where multiple seas, each representing "the other half," intersect. The tides, winds, and currents of the wealth, power, and control of others rip, buffet, and swirl around my calves, threatening to pull me -- with my one foot in and my one foot out -- to death? to paradise? Certainly to a place that no longer resembles our authentic, year-round communities.

It takes a lot of energy, muscle, and intention for each of us to stand tall right where we are against the values and dreams of "the other half."

Yet stand we must.

#gentrification

#theotherhalf

#newblogpost

#connecticut

#florida

#daddreams