~black and white wednesday~ the least of these

Posted on March 15, 2017 by marybethrew

for today’s post i’m sharing photos by sebastiao salgado.

it was a couple of hours of my time well spent, wandering through the berkeley art museum back in 2002, absorbing salgado’s amazing collection migrations: humanity in transition. i was adrift myself, recently relocated far from home in a post 9/11 political climate, when i took in these visually stunning photos of displaced people from all over the world. something about them really touched my core; my account of the exhibit and the feelings it evoked, complete with the exhibit pamphlet and newspaper clippings of salgado’s photos, fills several pages of my journal from that time. that journal is full of many other long entries as i was sorting out a lot of my own values and beliefs – as you do when you’re 23 and know absolutely no one. i had landed a technician job in a marine mammal genetics lab, relocated 3000 miles away in my 1988 corsica, which promptly blew a head gasket, and i spent the next 5 years making my way around the bay area on borrowed and second-hand bikes. at the time i saw this exhibit, i was still pretty fresh off a schooner, both broke and nursing a broken heart, and eating rice and beans and whatever fresh vegetables i could fit in my backpack on the 6 mile uphill trek home to the oakland hills.

“there are adults who have lived their whole lives in camps where only the oldest remember where they were displaced from. there are children who have been separated from their families in the chaos of flight from violence, warfare. whole orphanages full of them.” the journal entry was seriously grappling with the privilege i felt guilty to be enjoying, compared to the poverty and fear experienced by so many.

i don’t feel such overwhelming guilt now, but i do feel a sense of responsibility for maintaining an awareness of the plight of people much less fortunate than myself. as elie wiesel put it so well, “as long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. as long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. what all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.”

elie wiesel is also quoted as saying, “no human being is illegal.” which, when you think about it, is a no-brainer. i like how he thinks, which i guess is why i’ve kept insisting on quoting him recently. he seems to have understood that someone else having rights, not only doesn’t detract from one’s own rights; on the contrary, it enhances everyone’s freedom.

a country based on freedom should have policy that reflects it. i remain unconvinced of the supposed threat we face from refugees, and remain convinced that it is our responsibility to treat “the least of these” with compassion. in the aftermath of muslim ban 1.0, before the judicial system rightfully put a stop to it, many legal permanent residents were cast into uncertainty about their lives, careers, and futures in their legal country of residence, scrambling until judges upheld their right to not be illegally deported, their right to have their families reunited. a breastfeeding (american citizen) baby was separated from her (legal permanent resident) mother at an airport, for hours, unable to receive comfort or nutrition from her mother because of this chaos. an eleven month old infant: truly, the least of these.

muslim ban 2.0 cannot be allowed to stand either. my safety, my security, my freedom is not enhanced by separating nursing infants from their mothers; it is degraded. my security is not enhanced by refusing to accept someone who is without a homeland.

i understand that those who want to join our country need to be vetted. but this is already happening. what part of the already extensive vetting process needs improvement? what’s the plan to improve it? in the meantime, how can you evaluate the vetting process accurately without seeing it in action? if it was truly so flawed it needed to be halted, what were the problems that were identified? who slipped through the cracks, what harm did they cause, how did they get through vetting undetected? what is the actual threat prevented by a ban? (hint: there isn’t one.)

this author, who claims, “i’m pro life, but i hope to become more so,” put this lack of threat in perspective. “since 1980, three million refugees have been resettled in the united states. in that time not one has taken the life of an american in an act of terrorism. the conservative cato institute estimates that the likelihood of an individual american being killed in an act of terrorism committed by a refugee is one in 3.64 billion a year. somehow it does not feel truly and fully pro-life to be unwilling to give up one-3.64 billionth of my security to make room for someone bombed out of their city, someone who is homeless, cold and unwelcomed.”

this article outlines all “major terrorist attacks” since 9/11 on american soil… “of this list, zero fatal attacks were carried out by immigrants from the seven muslim-majority countries targeted by the ban. two attacks were carried out by individuals with ties to the seven countries: the 2006 unc suv attack, and the 2016 ohio state university attack. neither of those plots resulted in american deaths.”

terrorist attacks carried out by american citizens from montana, tennessee, arkansas, texas, wisconsin, new jersey, kansas, nevada, south carolina, and colorado did, though.

which is why i think it’s important that we keep the “countering violent extremism” program focused broadly on all forms of violent extremism, including the domestic white supremacist brand.

another article succinctly laid out the facts concerning the “phantom menace” a muslim ban would claim to combat:

nationals of the seven countries singled out… have killed zero people in terrorist attacks on u.s. soil between 1975 and 2015.

zero.

six iranians, six sudanese, two somalis, two iraqis, and one yemeni have been convicted of attempting or executing terrorist attacks on u.s. soil during that time period…

over the last four decades, 20 out of 3.25 million refugees welcomed to the united states have been convicted of attempting or committing terrorism on u.s. soil, and only three americans have been killed in attacks committed by refugees—all by cuban refugees in the 1970s.

between 1975 and 2015, the ‘annual chance of being murdered by somebody other than a foreign-born terrorist was 252.9 times greater than the chance of dying in a terrorist attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist…’

i mean, call me crazy, but i’ll take my chances and open my arms to refugees.

in the words of jack white, “love is the truth – it’s the right thing to do.”

~black and white wednesday~ love not fear

Posted on February 22, 2017 by marybethrew

75 years ago, on february 19, 1942, executive order 9066 was signed, enabling the incarceration of japanese americans. our federal government stole 3 years of the lives of over 100,000 people, stole their livelihoods and dignity as well, in many cases. they did this in the name of national security. the rights of these people were suspended based on suspicion, not fact or evidence.

the fact is, that no evidence of spying or sabotage by any japanese americans has ever been discovered.

alternative facts, circa 1942:

“The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on American soil, possessed of American citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted. …It, therefore, follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today. There are indications that these are organized and ready for concerted action at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”

— General John L. DeWitt, head of the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command

“A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched—so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents—grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”

— Los Angeles Times, February 2, 1942

did you know that nowhere in executive order 9066 did president roosevelt identify the particular americans whose rights would be violated? the order simply circumvented the constitution by establishing a zone from which “any or all” persons could be excluded. i didn’t know that until a few days ago, and the comparison to current events came into sharper focus for me.

(white) Wartime Civil Control Administration workers

because japanese americans looked like the enemy, they were given identification numbers, put on buses, and forced to sleep on straw mattresses in horse stalls. they were not given due process, not charged with crimes, because they hadn’t committed any crime. evacuees built the barbed wire fence intended to contain themselves; forcing prisoners of war to labor is a violation of the geneva convention which states, “No persons may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.”

prisoners clearing more land to hold more prisoners

in the grip of fear, we lost sight of our values.

george takei, who was five years old when his family was imprisoned, reminds us that, “The stigmatization, separation and labeling of our fellow humans based on race or religion has never led to a more secure world. But it has too often led to one where the most vulnerable pay the highest price.”

i was touched by the photos of japanese prisoners taken by dorothea lange. in the spirit of frederick douglass, i am once again engaging in photo activism, borrowing her amazing work, which as far as i understand, is in the public domain. up until 2006, most of them were hidden away in the national archive, and were only seen for the first time a decade ago.

i was particularly moved by the photos of japanese american farmers who were removed from their land, as a farm kid myself, there are few things that pain me as much as the thought of losing our land. though it was claimed the prisoners would be “given opportunities to continue farming and other callings,” that promise was obviously never going to make up for the loss of land and livelihood, and reminds me a bit of the potted plants i kept on my sidewalk when i lived in the city.

there isn’t (to my knowledge) an official day of remembrance for the japanese internment, but informally, many paused and remembered this past sunday, on the 75^th anniversary of executive order 9066. i hope we do not need to commit any more atrocities against people of any race, religion, or ethnicity, because the calendar feels full of heavy, dark remembrances already. may remembering these grim events in our collective past prevent more crimes against humanity from bring committed; may we live based on love instead of fear.

~black and white wednesday~ this land

Posted on February 15, 2017 by marybethrew

this land is your land, this land is my land

from california to the new york island

from the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters

this land was made for you and me

~woody guthrie

reason #9761 i know that i have found the right man to spend my life with: he has counted exactly how many redwood trees are growing on this land.

lest anyone come to the false conclusion that this post is unpolitical, since i kicked it off with a woody guthrie folk song, i will share one more frederick douglass quote with you as we honor black history month:

“in thinking of america, i sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. but my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. when i remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when i remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, i am filled with unutterable loathing.”

-frederick douglass

~thankful thursday~ sailor hair don’t care

Posted on December 2, 2016 by marybethrew

11-25-16 day 25

i am thankful for an unexpected extra 24 hours with my boy today, which was made all the more wonderful by his getting to spend time with rich’s daughter. we are missing some family members this thanksgiving, but having a couple of “our kids” together made it very special. i was reminded of when these two of our kids met for the first time almost 5 years ago, and the way they automatically struck up a friendship, regardless of their age difference. these two pictures, one from the day they met, and one from today, represent how it’s been between them all along. quinn has always taken it for granted that rich’s daughter of course wants to play with him, whether it was coloring dinosaurs, or comparing pokemon go stats, and she is a great sport and always makes an effort to give him attention when she visits. one of my favorite things about rich is what sweet, wonderful, genuine, kind people he raised, and i’m happy to count them as a part of my family!

11-26-16 day 26

i am thankful that i have at least 3 buyers of the book i haven’t started writing yet. that is going to buy me several batches of nacho ingredients, if this whole science career thing doesn’t work out, and certainly the current political climate doesn’t bode well for a long term biology career. it’s good to have a backup plan! i’m super qualified to write books, because i beat my little brother in words with friends at least as often as he beats me.

i’m also thankful for words starting with the letter q, namely quinn, and quilt love from grammy. and qi, because it’s worth lots of points sometimes. plus, you know, life force/energy flow and all.

11-27-16 day 27

today i am grateful for role models. i have spent the weeks since the presidential election not knowing what to say about it, and i am still mostly finding myself adrift in that unknown. it has been a struggle to write on many of the days of this gratitude challenge, not because i don’t have a million things to be thankful for, but because i know that at least a few people will read what i write, and therefore have been feeling convicted to write about Important Things.

in little ways, i have snuck in references to Important Things in my thankful posts, but tonight my “about” description on my fb profile page caught my eye, and it still says what i originally wrote, back when i first opened the account:

ecofeminist pacifist radical mama
“the world is absurd, and beautiful, and small” – ani difranco

i’m not sure i’m living up to my self-given label, if i’m only hinting at the Important Things.

luckily i have some role models i look to in times like these, ani being one of them, who recently was photographed holding a sign reading, “i am no longer accepting the things i cannot change. i am changing the things i cannot accept.”

jane goodall and barbara kingsolver are also women i count among my heroes. jane recently posted a remembrance of elie wiesel, another person i’ve admired all my life, and mentioning him at a time like this, amidst a turbulent sense of anti-semitism (and anti-islamism, racism, etc.) on the rise, feels appropriate.

finally, barbara kingsolver so graciously offered to “go first,” and so i will quote her here and her reluctantly radical mention of many of the Important Things.

“With due respect for the colored ribbons we’ve worn for various solidarities, our next step is to wear something on our sleeve that takes actual courage: our hearts.

I’ll go first. If we’re artists, writers, critics, publishers, directors or producers of film or television, we reckon honestly with our role in shaping the American psyche. We ask ourselves why so many people just couldn’t see a 69-year-old woman in our nation’s leading role, and why they might choose instead a hero who dispatches opponents with glib cruelty. We consider the alternatives. We join the time-honored tradition of artists resisting government oppression through our work.

If we’re journalists, we push back against every door that closes on freedom of information. We educate our public about objectivity, why it matters, and what it’s like to work under a president who aggressively threatens news outlets and reporters.

If we’re consumers of art, literature, film, TV and news, we think about what’s true, and what we need. We reward those who are taking risks to provide it.

If we’re teachers we explicitly help children of all kinds feel safe in our classrooms under a bullying season that’s already opened in my town and probably yours. Language used by a president may enter this conversation. We say wrong is wrong.

If we’re scientists we escalate our conversation about the dangers of suppressing science education and denying climate change. We shed our cautious traditions and explain what people should know. Why southern counties are burning now and Florida’s coastal cities are flooding, unspared by any vote-count for denial.

If we’re women suffering from sexual assault or body image disorders, or if we’re their friends, partners or therapists, we acknowledge that the predatory persona of men like Trump is genuinely traumatizing. That revulsion and rage are necessary responses.”

i highly encourage you to read her full post linked here.

if you, like me, are feeling overwhelmed with figuring out exactly which actions to take, here is a handy document that i plan to utilize as a jumping off point for this week, to help stave off the paralysis.

i have no intention of compromising my integrity, and therefore it is only after careful consideration that i share other people’s content on this here public forum, erring instead on the side of saying my own clumsy piece, where i can do my best to ensure that i am not, as charles eisenstein put it, “smuggling in hatred” in the form of name-calling, othering, blaming, belittling or shaming.

but remaining silent right now would also compromise my integrity. this was something i had to learn as a domestic abuse victim, because staying silent was often a survival mechanism, but when my survival was not in question, my silence only gave permission to the abuser to continue his rants, and by remaining silent i was complicit in the problem. i do not wish to suggest by my silence that i agree with anything that man is doing in the name of my beloved country and my beloved people of every race, religion, ability, sexuality, and gender. i’m one of the women who experiences his every word as a trigger, having listened to someone close to me speak in exactly the same abusive manner, and as such, i believe every threat he made during his campaign, because, as maya angelou (another hero) said, “when someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

also, i am thankful for you sweet, generous people for continuing to read these incredibly long-winded gratitude posts. you’re all great. thank you.

11-28-16 day 28

i’m thankful for dolphins! it’s day 28 and i think it’s time for a dolphin break. they make me happy. i’ll save the long-winded dolphin stories for the book.

11-29-16 day 29

the penultimate gratitude!

i didn’t really mean to extend these last two days of the gratitude challenge, but yesterday i admit that i was not feeling thankful. i could still sense out in the periphery that i have piles and piles of things to be thankful for, and in a distant way, i was still thankful for those things, but in the more immediate sense, i was under a dark cloud, and my thankfulness gland wasn’t functioning properly. i had a vague a feeling of “at least i don’t live in aleppo,” but that just made me feel guilty that i wasn’t getting an A in the gratitude challenge when i should, since i don’t live in aleppo. imagine being ungrateful for all the nachos i am blessed to be eating lately.

i’m thankful that one can become increasingly aware of the shoulds and have to’s, and begin to reject them as needed in order to preserve one’s sanity.

i’m thankful for lau reminding me that it’s possible to feel like crap when things are happening that are less than ideal but minor, and also possible to feel well-adjusted and resilient when really shitty things are going on, and for reminding me that she’s seen me do the latter. which helped me not be so fearful of feeling crappy outside of aleppo, and stop playing the what-if-shit-moves-fanward games with myself.

i am also thankful for long hugs from the person who puts up with my insecurities even though he’s never given me one miniscule particle of reason to doubt his love.

and finally, i’m thankful for e. e. cummings.

you shall above all things be glad and young

For if you’re young,whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad

whatever’s living will yourself become.

Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:

i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man’s

flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid

and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:

for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave

called progress,and negation’s dead undoom.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

11-30-16 day 30

day 30! no pressure or anything. i guess i can’t do a one sentence post tonight? for some reason it seems like i should go out with more of a bang.

today i’m thankful for providence.

it’s a bit of an abstract concept, maybe not as tangible as nachos or fires in the wood stove. but i think it’s the best way to summarize the list of things that have come to mind today for which i feel grateful, many of which i forget by this time of day, given my penchant for short-term memory loss.

i’ve never been out to become wealthy or famous or get far ahead in life, i’m not a big competitor, i’ve always really valued a quiet, contented life, and i’ve always wanted to have the basics covered, to have just enough of everything i needed. i am not foolish enough to think i brought this all upon myself, instead i like to think there is energy/life force (qi? higher power of your choice?) that i can direct this thankfulness towards, for providing a $150 check when i had a $149 bill i needed to pay. when i say providence, i do not mean there is excess, but i do mean there is exactly what i need. and that pretty much describes my life, and i’m so grateful to be able to say that i have what i want, and want what i have.

i am going to borrow from past things i’ve written again, because i’m tired now, and because they capture what i want to say. while i’ve been feeling down, i’ve had the best possible support. this is something i wrote last year that explains why the person i’ve been given to go through this life with, and his mechanical analogies about flipping switches, is absolutely the right person for me:

now i have a man who validates and supports my whole being and loves all of me, containing my feelings by refusing to allow my self-loathing neural pathways to open back up. this is truer to the core of how i see myself (a person of integrity) than any desire to have my self-loathing “validated” in the ways someone else would “validate” it, by encouraging that self-loathing and feeding that monster.

“darling, you will not find

in the well into which you fall

what i keep for you on the heights:

a bouquet of dewy jasmines,

a kiss deeper than your abyss.”

-pablo neruda, except from his poem the well, from the captain’s verses

thank you all for following along on my impulsive, long-winded, rambling, gratitude practice extravaganza; see you all again next november 1^st! and finally, i’ll close with this little ditty i wrote almost 5 years ago, about the things we envision for our lives, and the way the energy of the universe works its magic and manifests them; tonight’s gratitude was brought to you by the number 11 and the color red violet:

quinn’s favorite crayon at the moment is red violet. he has been choosing to color in bed before going to sleep most nights lately, and over the weekend i went in to turn off his light and he had red violet laying directly in the center of his chest, safely tucked there for sleep. it was always my favorite, too. i think i know why, now that i see it lying next to the heart of a sleeping child i love enough to burst my own heart wide open. red violet, the color of love.

i look up and see my man pull the almost-empty jar of pears out of the fridge and open it up with his big man hands and take a swig of the juice that’s left… getting to watch that sure beats my default method of tossing the dregs into the next smoothie. i don’t know how to say this, and it feels vulnerable to admit that all this time i’ve been writing about me and what i’m doing and what i want out of life… this was right up there on that list. it may have been unspoken… i may never have admitted to wanting someone who appreciates, as he calls it, my goofy hippie food. i know i did admit to feelings of loneliness a time or two, in rare instances when i paused long enough in my manic food-gathering endeavors to experience them, but underlying all the gardening and canning and fruit picking and cheese making and skill learning has been a secret longing for someone to share all of it with. i would never undervalue how important this process has been for myself, and in no way has man-getting been my primary motivation (there are many other motivations including my own health and sanity and quinn’s health and education being biggies, not to mention simply feeding ourselves sustainably, literally obtaining the calories needed to maintain homeostasis) but i find now that i am settling into this new phase of life with an enormous appreciation for the extra harvesting i did last summer and a permanent smile when i get to feed it to someone who has been on a vacation from cooking for some time. (surely he won’t be embarrassed if i publish on the internet that i removed a box of falafel mix from his cupboard with a sell-by date sometime in 1997, a bagel from 2008- can i say wow to the ingredient mold inhibitor?, and other items scattered throughout the decade in between).

i know i’m not the only one feeling this way… in a rare january occurrence of nice weather on a non-work day, i spent saturday afternoon pruning blueberry bushes, grapevines, and trees, and hacking away at blackberry canes in one of the garden patches that has been waiting for me to come along… next to a guy who has been waiting for me to come along and do this with. there were years and years of preparation leading up to us being in the same yoga class on the same night… years of fixing his own cars, to get him ready for when he would get to fix mine (and give me rides to work when the mechanic had to fix it more- hard to describe the weight lifted off my shoulders on just the one subject of mechanical stuff). years of me waking up to the farming instinct i’ve harbored since birth, to get me ready for when i would have space to let it loose on. years of us both getting ourselves sorted out and secure and in all other ways ready for this big love. i find myself gently detaching from the need to be entirely self-sufficient. i find myself able to lean on someone who is also gently leaning on me, because we can both stand up straight on our own two feet and have been for quite some time… the give and take is easy to open up to, and i couldn’t have seen that coming, for all my self-sufficient feminist single mama superwoman-ness.

a little over ten years ago, i got to do a retreat where we visualized our future self, ten years hence. my future self was alone, and the leader of the exercise remarked on the rarity of aloneness in that particular exercise. she said most people visualize their future family or friends around them, and i was just me, in a small room/house/yurt, feeling self sufficient and “just enough” and “whole” (words that resonated at the time and ever since that are still written in a prominent place above my desk) and yet with a sense of loved ones nearby (though they were not in the picture). when i left future me, i gave her a kiss on the lips and have wondered ever since, why i was to be alone all my life… why was it that i somehow had to do this whole life thing by myself when everyone else gets to find a mate and settle down happily ever after? you know, it never occurred to me one single time, in all the many times i’ve thought of that visualization (which has clung to me like water ever since), that year eleven would come along. but now i suddenly see the red violet writing on the wall…

mb

magic & bioluminescence

Tag Archives: politics

~black and white wednesday~ the least of these

~black and white wednesday~ love not fear

~black and white wednesday~ this land

~thankful thursday~ sailor hair don’t care