A Muslim family was out for a walk in London, Ontario, a regional city. Five went out and one returned — the rest mown down by a racist piece of garbage in his truck, who hated them for being…non-white. Non-Christian.
The sole survivor is a nine-year-old boy, orphaned.
And now a vicious and brutal attack on a gay man in Toronto for daring to be homosexual.
Not sure how I will celebrate Canada Day, July 1, this year.
Not sure I want to right now.
I haven’t been back to Canada since September 2019 because of Covid; the border has been closed ever since unless my travel is “essential” and it’s not.
Canadians so love to congratulate themselves for being polite and civil and compassionate, traditionally welcoming far more refugees and immigrants than the U.S. and many other countries.
Their social policies are generally much more generous than those in the U.S.
And they really enjoy making sure they are so much better than those nasty, violent racist Americans.
Today? I think not.
When I last lived in Toronto, the streetcar I took to the subway was filled with Caribbean Blacks, the bus down Spadina to my newspaper job filled with Vietnamese.
That was just normal life there.
No one noticed. No one sparked violence.
Pay your taxes, get along.
There isn’t a lot useful to say here, really, beyond expressing my horror and deep disappointment in my country of origin. Sadly, I just expect daily racism and violence in the U.S. It’s baked into the DNA here.
Canada is 100 years younger.
It did not have slavery — although its racist policies have destroyed generations of Inuit and indigenous lives.
These are not posts that are deeply and personally confessional, but my (generally left-leaning) opinions on politics and my disgust with where we’ve ended up in 2018.
It’s a natural response — and, in some cases, the right response — to try to hold the line against political reaction, to shame people who espouse shameful ideas. But shame is a politically volatile emotion, and easily turns into toxic resentment. It should not be overused. I don’t know exactly where to draw the line between ideas that deserve a serious response, and those that should be only mocked and scorned. I do know that people on the right benefit immensely when they can cultivate the mystique of the forbidden.
In February, Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has garnered a cultlike following, asked, in an interview with Vice, “Can men and women work together in the workplace?” To him, the Me Too movement called into question coed offices, a fundamental fact of modern life, because “things are deteriorating very rapidly at the moment in terms of the relationships between men and women.”
Having to contend with this question fills me with despair. I would like to say: It’s 2018 and women’s place in public life is not up for debate! But to be honest, I think it is. Trump is president. Everywhere you look, the ugliest and most illiberal ideas are gaining purchase. Refusing to take them seriously won’t make them go away. (As it happens, I’m participating in a debate with Peterson next week in Toronto.)
I shy far away, here and on Facebook and usually on Twitter, from so many political subjects — gun use and abortion, being two of them — that will only provoke trolls, bullies and harassers.
I have no time, energy or appetite to get into fights with ghosts over this stuff, no matter how passionately I feel about them, which I do.
It’s become a world of virtue signalling, spittle-flecked (out) rage and worse.
I see some bloggers sticking resolutely close to home with soothing/inspiring images and posts.
I get it.
I wish I dared.
But I don’t.
Are you also holding back on your blog and other social media?
For Jews and Christians, this is an important time of year — Passover begins March 30 and, for Christians, this is Holy Week, culminating April 1 this year with Easter.
Jose and I were back in church this week for Palm Sunday, our first visit since Christmas Eve. It was good to see old friends, although painful to realize, in their faces and their stooped postures, the passing years.
One man, a tall, imposing former schoolteacher, now bends almost double, accompanied by his nurse. A white-haired woman sits alone, now widowed. Once-tiny children are now in their 20s, married or engaged or living far away.
There are few places in life, beyond one’s own family, to intimately witness others’ lives firsthand, sharing the joy of baptisms and marriages or the sudden appearance of someone’s name on a prayer list.
No matter how little we may have in common outside the building, we’re community within it.
I rarely address questions here of faith, religion or spirituality.
This amazing image was across the hall from my hotel room in Rovinj, Croatia, an 18th century building that was the town’s former bishops’ residence
Not because it’s not a matter of interest or reflection for me, but out of respect for Broadside’s many readers who are agnostic, atheist and those who may have suffered brutal treatment within a religious tradition.
And some of you once followed a belief system and chose to leave it.
I’m not a “cradle Christian” — i.e. someone born into a deeply religious church-going family. Quite the opposite. My father is avowedly atheist and my mother became a devout Catholic when I was 12.
But I attended an Anglican (Episcopal) boarding school that subjected us to Sunday nights of prayers and slide shows by visiting missionaries, and put me right off religion for years. We sang hymns, some of which (All Things Bright and Beautiful!) I still love deeply.
I chose to be baptized when I was 13, in Toronto.
But my relationship with church has been intermittent.
I first came to St. Barnabas, a lovely small stone church in Irvington, New York, (the Hudson river town just south of ours), in a moment of panic and crisis, late on Christmas Eve of 1996. My mother had flown in from Canada, arriving drunk. The evening didn’t improve from there., I dropped her at a local hotel and, suddenly totally alone for the holidays, had no idea where to go or what to do.
I slipped into one of the dark wooden pews at St. B’s, deeply grateful for its welcome.
I’ve been attending services there, off and on, since then. It’s felt, at times, like a poor fit for me, someone who isn’t — like many of its members — a perky stay-at-home mother or a corporate warrior working on Wall Street or at a major law firm. I’ve made a few friends there, but it’s not a group into which I naturally fit in easily.
In some ways, though, I think that’s important.
One value of religious or spiritual community is its shared yet sometimes invisible yearning for wisdom and tradition, for evidence of faith and hope — not the usual pattern-matching that leads us to spend time only with others who look and sound just like us. (Don’t get me wrong — if a place feels genuinely unwelcoming, fleeing can be a wise choice.)
In American culture, so devoted to the pursuit of temporal and visible wealth and power, I increasingly crave a place of spiritual rest and respite. It’s helpful to be reminded of deeper values.
To sit in those polished pews — where worshipers have been gathering since 1853 — connects me to a larger world and its history.
I also treasure the esthetic experience of our church’s stained glass windows, its lovely organ, (donated in 2000 by one member), its mosaic altar, its physical intimacy.
I enjoy the familiar liturgy. One of its traditions is the Peace — greeting one another with a hug or handshake — offering our wishes for the peace of the Lord to each other. It’s one of my favorite moments.
My husband Jose, is a devout Buddhist, in the Dzogchen tradition, but accompanies me to services. I’ve met his lama, Surya Das, and spent a week with them in a silent Buddhist retreat in the summer of 2011 before Jose and I married.
He’s also a PK, a preacher’s kid, whose father was a Southern Baptist minister in Santa Fe, New Mexico, so he is blessedly at home in many spaces of quiet contemplation.
A dear friend sent me an e-card for Christmas, filled with birds and flowers and music.
Her message, typically feisty, ended with: “And in 2017 we fight!”
An avowed, life-long progressive — and one of the smartest science writers I know (here’s a link to her terrific book, “Fevered” , about climate change and its effects on health, globally) — she’s full of piss and vinegar as I think we all should be in 2017, and for the next four years.
There has been a shocking and dis-spiriting increase in hate crimes, physical attacks and appalling verbal abuse in the past few months, both in Britain post-Brexit and in the United States, after the election of a President who has vilified women, Muslims, Mexicans and many others.
Not acceptable!
By “fight” I don’t mean fisticuffs.
I don’t mean screaming abuse back at someone who’s clearly got boundary issues.
Nor do I mean seeking some shouty, nasty draaaaama, if that can be avoided.
But I do mean — stiffen your spine, no matter how scared you are of what might happen if you do. (Clearly, not if you live in an abusive situation, where your life and that of others is at risk.)
In the past month, after long deliberation and, yes, fearful of the consequences, I finally stood up and fought for myself in three difficult and enervating situations, one within my family (I wrote a long letter, snail mailed); one within my parish (ditto) and one with a client whose disregard for basic courtesy (and abysmal pay) were grim beyond words.
It takes guts to tell someone, (who can just blow you off completely): “Enough!”
It takes trust in your own judgment of what you truly most need.
It also means preparing for the potential consequences, the most frightening bit: loss of income, loss of affection, affiliation, respect, losing your welcome within a community.
But the costs of not fighting for what you know is right can be crippling to your mental, emotional and physical health.
To your self-esteem and confidence.
So, eventually, it must be done.
Ask for help before you do it, from a friend, a therapist, a loving partner, to steady your nerves and make sure you’re not about to self-immolate.
But we’re also living in strange and challenging times, politically.
So, it’s also time to go fight the good fight for social justice and economic progress that doesn’t , once more, simply re-enrich the already wealthy; 95 percent of Americans, according to a recent New York Times report, have seen no rise in their income in seven years.
If all we do is whinge and cringe, nothing will change.
So…
Write to your elected representatives.
Work hard – if you live in the U.S. — to get some Democrats elected in the mid-term elections, only two years away.
Donate your time, energy or money to Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and other groups working daily to protect our rights, bodily and civil.
Write letters to the editor, in print; women, especially! Most of those appearing these days are written by men.
On-line, leave civil, smart comments.
If you’re a writer, send out some op-eds, essays and opinion pieces or reported stories to keep issues front and center.
If you see someone being verbally abused in a public setting, stand beside them to signal that you’re an ally. Speak calmly and quietly to them. Do not ignore cruelty; passivity signals assent.
It’s not the time to shrug and look away.
It’s not the time to say “Not my problem.”
It’s not the time to just soak up fake news and comforting lies.
It’s not the time to ignore the news because “it’s too depressing.” It’s our world.
There is never a “time and place” for cruelty. By staying silent, you robbed the little girl of the acknowledgment and the apology to which she was entitled. And you deprived the boy of learning the consequences of nasty behavior. He may not understand how mean he was. But your inaction ensured that his ignorance persists.
Five years ago this week, my husband — then fiance — decided to take me to a silent Buddhist retreat.
It was a birthday gift, one he thought might prove calming and healing.
I went in like a sulky five-year-old, arms crossed, dubious.
I emerged with a lot of new insights — if you’re interested, search my archives for July 2011 and you’ll find them, as I posted every day, a bit stunned by how powerful my feelings were and how much they changed over that week.
I’m not a Buddhist, but have spent time at various sanghas with Jose, who is, so was already familiar with the language, precepts and rituals like mantras, chants and prayers. I also knew and was friends with his lama, Surya Das, so wasn’t intimidated by him or his presence. Had every single bit of it been unfamiliar, it might have been even more challenging.
It’s never a bad thing to withdraw and retreat from the insanity of “normal” life and this was an opportunity to do so, and one — I admit — I would never have undertaken on my own.
A play is on in New York City right now, Small Mouth Sounds, premised on exactly this thing — a group of people attending a week-long silent retreat — and it addresses the emotional turmoil so many people bring with them into the meditation hall.
In a week of silence, your heart speaks very loudly indeed.
Every morning, as we nestled once more into our cushions or chairs for the morning teaching, more and more were empty as people fled, unable or unwilling to stay.
Even those who stayed rebelled, some driving off-campus in their cars to a local bar or standing deep in the woods, yammering on the cellphones — both a violation of the rules we agreed to when we arrived; 75 of us had come from across the globe to do this thing, knowing it would be difficult, and craving that discipline.
I emerged from it dazed, sharpened, newly and exquisitely aware of the daily noise we barely even notice, and had never been conscious of before: cars, sirens, animals, neighbors, airplanes overhead, people talking on their cellphones or listening to music too loudly through headphones.
Jose and I drove to a local bar — where two enormous television screens blared…something. Instead of it feeling, as it usually would, like background noise it was suddenly alien and very much in the foreground. We felt assaulted and exhausted by it.
I missed the precious, glorious, cocooning silence we’d bathed in all week.
I missed the inter-generational community we had created in our silence, sometimes with just a raised eyebrow or shy smile.
I missed sitting in the retreat’s luxurious garden, alone for an hour, my only companion a very bad bunny eating everything he could reach.
I missed the soothing simplicity of our days, from the waking early-morning hand bell rung down the long corridors to our meals eaten together at long wooden refectory tables, the only sounds the clinking of cutlery on china.
The retreat offers three teachings a day, the only time we’ll be allowed to speak. The food will be vegetarian. There will be no cocktail hour, or wine at dinner, both something we usually enjoy daily at home.
Steak? TV? Three daily newspapers? No, no, no. Ah, the things I cling to.
We’re taking my softball glove and ball, and my bike. I’m taking my camera and watercolors, and plan to write a speech due August 10 in Minneapolis.
I’ll sit in the teachings and meditations and chanting as much as feels comfortable. He and I will share a room, and plan to write notes back and forth. It will be very odd — and difficult — not to talk to him. We typically talk several hours a day and I really enjoy it.
So it’s already a powerful meditation on the loss of that comfort. We may whisper to one another in our room. We’ll see.
I’ve been the butt of jokes for weeks now. “Buddhist,vegetarian, silent — I can’t think of three words less likely to describe you,” said one friend.
The level of poverty in the U.S. is deeply shocking — given the astonishing wealth here
It’s been a week of horror, shock, dismay.
It’s been a week of disbelief that American police officers are gunned down in cold blood in Dallas during a peaceful march — and disbelief that even more black men have been shot and killed by police as well.
In Dallas, local residents are approaching police officers, many likely for the first time, to hug them and pray with them and thank them for getting up every day, ideally, to serve and protect them.
In normal life, barring bad luck or criminal behavior, very few of us ever talk to a police officer.
Few of us are likely to know one socially unless police work, as it is often is, is part of your own family.
As a career journalist, for whom aggressively challenging hierarchy and questioning authority is key to doing my job well, interactions with police have been been few and far between — I didn’t cover “cops” as part of my job and, more generally, the way police are trained to think and behave is very different from that of journalists.
So how, then, do we ever meet, sit down with and get to know “the other”?
That “other” — i.e. someone whose race, religion, politics, ethnicity or socioeconomic class is wildly different from our own — is someone we really need to know and care about, more than ever.
The divisions, literally, are killing us.
How, then, and where, do we meet one another?
In a world now devoted to narrowed and narrower niches of communication — Snapchat, Tumblr, Reddit, blogs, media slanted in one direction or another — how do we find and listen thoughtfully to other points of view than our own?
How do we sit down face to face and have a civil conversation?
It doesn’t have to be about anything serious. It might be about baseball or music or what books you’ve been reading or your theory about Dany and her dragons on Game of Thrones.
A tram ticket in Dublin. Travel, to anywhere new to you — if you’re curious and open-hearted — can broaden your vision and understanding.
For me, there are only two places like this right now, and I wish I had more.
One is the church I attend, although less and less of late. It is in a small, wealthy, white and conservative town near me. Of those labels, I’m white.
It’s a polite crowd, but deeply corporate and high-earning, with no one who really understands why I and my husband would choose such a poorly paid industry as journalism. What we have done for decades, and done very well, seems like an amusing hobby to them.
I’ve stayed partly because of those differences, although they are starting to wear me down.
The challenge of engaging with “the other” — beyond stilted chit-chat — is initial discomfort. They might have grown up somewhere far away you’ve never seen or attended a college you’ve never heard of. Maybe they didn’t go to college.
They might out-earn you by a factor of 10, or vice versa. Your collar might be white, blue or none, because you work, as we do freelance, at home in a T-shirt.
The discomfort of “the other” — and theirs with you! — is the point of friction we have to move beyond to create and enjoy dialogue, understanding and friendship.
Just because it’s uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s not well worth the effort.
The other place I frequently meet a wide range of people and experiences is with a group of men and women, ages 20s to 70s, who play softball on Saturday mornings. We’ve been doing that since 2001, an unimaginably long time to do anything in a world that changes daily.
In a time of economic and political disruption, even chaos, it’s a haven of comfort and familiarity — even as it brings together a disparate group: a retired ironworker, several physicians, several lawyers, several editors, a gallerist.
After each game, about a dozen of us sit under a tree at a local cafe for a long lunch, whose conversations can turn surprisingly personal and intimate.
It’s not some Kumbaya moment and the group could be even more diverse — people find us through our friendships, generally.
If you never meet or talk to people who are very different from you, how can you credibly listen to their experiences and concerns, giving them the same validity you do your own group(s)?
Try climbing those steps in the dark, wearing a headlamp! My week in rural Nicaragua, working with WaterAid, was an extraordinary education. Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere
I grew up in Toronto, one of the world’s most multi-cultural cities, in a country whose population of immigrants remains higher than that of the U.S. — 20.6 percent.
In the U.S., with 10 times the population of Canada — it’s 13.3 percent.
Statistically, there, your odds of encountering someone very unlike you — in your classroom at school or college, on your hockey team, in your apartment building, on the subway or bus — are high in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. Calgary now has a Muslim mayor (as does London.)
So it’s normal to know, like and respect people who worship on different days, wear different clothing, eat different foods. They’re just…different…not, per se, a threat.
When Jose and I think about moving elsewhere for retirement, our first question is not just “can we afford it?” or “what’s the weather like there”?
It’s — how comfortable will he feel as a man with brown skin?
Donald Trump’s dog whistles of hatred and racism are deeply shocking to many people, in the U.S. and beyond.
My husband is of Mexican heritage, and well established in his field so the taunts can’t hurt him professionally.
But they are a disgusting way to dismiss a nation of people whose hard work has helped the U.S. for decades, if not centuries.
In a time of relentless, growing fear and xenophobia, I hope you’ll keep talking to, listening to and staying close to “the other”, however that plays out in your life.
The late David Carr, NYT media columnist — much missed. Brilliant, no bullshit.
Their clothes are drab, cheap, poorly- fitting.
All they do is sit at desks or talk on the phone or knock on doors.
Their work takes months.
Why on earth would this make a compelling film?
I admit it, I’m biased, having worked as a journalist for more than 20 years. I’ve been doing it since my undergraduate years at university and still enjoy it, even though 24,000 of us lost our jobs in 2008 and thousands more are losing their jobs every year now.
The film is about the Boston Globe’s investigative team, called Spotlight, and their controversial and much-challenged decision to look into allegations of child abuse within the Catholic church there.
The cast is terrific — fellow Canadian Rachel McAdams, John Slattery (of Mad Men), Mark Ruffalo, Stanley Tucci.
The newsroom looks like every newsroom everywhere, overlit, ugly, standard-issue desks and chairs, glass-walled executive offices. Its power structure, (interesting how it parallels the church they investigate, and how every senior editor is male), also deeply familiar.
The mix of political cynicism and compassion for the people they’re covering — and the remorse they feel as they realize they knew about the story years before and ignored it — also resonate.
But what left me in tears was how truthful is the portrayal of my work, certainly as part of a daily newspaper staff; I worked at the Globe & Mail, the Montreal Gazette and the New York Daily News.
It takes patience.
It takes persistence.
It takes a ton of tedious-but-essential detail work like reading old directories and chasing down court documents.
It takes a belief that what you’re doing all day, for months, actually might make a substantive difference — at best — in the lives of your readers.
Working as a news or investigative reporter is a weird mix of aggressive digging, pressure to stop digging, (by angry sources, power brokers, bosses worried you won’t bring home the goods), and the growing conviction that you’re on a huge story you have to get, no matter the cost.
Your co-workers may question and resent you — since they’re expected to crank out copy every day, possibly multiple times a day — and your team has yet to show anything in print, even after months of work.
The people you’re investigating will do anything to shut you down, from polite threats over a cocktail to appeals to your civic pride. (It can get much more bare-knuckled than that.)
The film shows reporters doing what no film ever shows — reporting.
That means knocking on door after door, some of them slammed in your face, some of them suddenly opened and a confession spilling out so fast you write it down as you walk away, as McAdams does in one scene.
It can mean sitting with, and witnessing, incredible pain when someone tells you they have been molested or raped, but not hugging them or saying anything — instead, as McAdams does — saying quietly, “We need specific language.”
Me, hard at work on assignment in Bilwi, Nicaragua.
To anyone but a reporter, she sounds shockingly callous and cold. Why isn’t she comforting the man telling her his secrets?
Because that’s not our job. (Even if, and it often is, our social impulse.)
I’ve been in that place, as someone who had been raped told me her story. It’s a delicate moment you’re neither trained or prepared for, like holding a water balloon — one false move and it shatters. You have to be calm, quiet, empathetic and just listen. Your job is to witness, not to emote or react.
I loved that the female reporter is portrayed as dogged and relentless as her two male peers. We are!
I love that her nails are bare, that she wears no jewelery but a plain wedding band and apparently little make-up. In the world of news journalism, that shit really doesn’t matter. It’s one reason I love it and felt comfortable within it.
It was powerful to see the conflict between the reporter’s private feelings — about faith, about the Church, about their own history — and the work they were doing. I know reporters personally who covered this story and what it did to them emotionally. This rang true.
I loved seeing a brief glimpse of a friend’s book, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, and his name in the final credits; Jason Berry, a New Orleans journalist, was one of the first to write about this issue. I met Jason in Paris many years ago when we were both chosen to participate in a year-long European journalism fellowship.
When I left the theater to use the bathroom, three women my age there had just seen it as well — and we got into a long, deep, impassioned and personal conversation about the film and why journalists want to do that kind of work. It was an amazing encounter for all of us, one of whom works with Catholic church abuse victims.
I told them about my two books and the kind of interviews I’ve done that were equally soul-searing, and my hope that sharing them with a larger audience would be useful somehow. It made me realize, sadly, how rarely I get to talk to non-journalists about my work and why I believe so deeply in the value of it, still. It moved me to hear from three others that it matters to them as well.
If you care at all about journalism and why, at best, people still want to do it for a living — and I know that many people simply hate journalists and don’t trust us — go see this film!
The Paris Unity March, Jan. 11, 2015. Faith in action — that collective community response still matters
I married a PK, a preacher’s kid.
Jose’s father was a Baptist minister in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His parish numbered about 30 — with a church large enough to hold 200. He faced many empty pews, yet kept on going.
His mother was a kindergarten teacher.
She was, he says, the epitome of faith.
Money was often tight and Jose, the sensitive, often worried baby of the family, sometimes wondered if everything would be OK.
“Have faith,” his mother told him.
We tend to talk about faith in narrow religious terms, as faith in a deity or a set of guidelines.
I’m interested, here, in the faith we place in ourselves, in one another and in the world around us.
Without it, without even a shred of it, we’re paralyzed. Too scared to move.
I started selling my creative work to strangers when I was 12. I sat on a Toronto street corner and sold bead necklaces. At 15, I sold my home-made stationery and at 18, my photos — and was gratefully stunned when one of the city’s top fashion photographers bought one.
Maybe that flickering flame of faith in myself, in my nascent skills, in my ability to connect with others who found value in my work danced a little higher then.
Yes, this machine will work. If we feared it wouldn’t, then what?
Without faith in ourselves we’re lost.
Without faith in our parents — to guide, teach, protect us — we feel un-moored and unsafe.
Without faith in our intelligence and stamina, we can’t accept that learning can be exhausting and difficult.
It takes tremendous faith to forge ahead in the face of despair, illness, fear and anxiety.
To wake up with pennies in your pocket and to find the faith that, somehow, things are going to get better.
To face a diagnosis that terrifies you, and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
To inhabit a home that once welcomed your husband or wife, now fled to the arms of someone else, wondering if anyone, anywhere, will ever love you again.
I think faith is forged in the fire of fear.
Phoenix-like, we have to rise from the smoking embers of what-we-thought-would-happen, while we figure out what happens next instead.
Without some solid skills we know we can trust, without friends and family who know and believe in the best of us, without some notion it will all be OK, we’re toast.
Having survived some horrendous episodes in my own past — a mentally-ill parent, family alcoholism, divorce, job loss, criminal attack — I know I’ll make it through. Somehow.
The past few weeks, for a variety of reasons, have demanded I stolidly move forward, in spite of sometimes paralyzing doubt in a few outcomes. Without the faith I’ll survive them, emotionally and physically, I’d consider staying in bed in the fetal position.
Instead, I went out this weekend to play softball with my co-ed pickup team, a posse of people, some 50 years apart in age, that I’ve known, loved and shared post-game, beneath-the-trees lunches with for a decade.
I stepped up to the plate, picked up the bat, wondered, in my first game of the season what would happen next — and hit a single.
Al Araibya reports that women in Iraq now face the prospect of FGM — female genital mutilation:
The al-Qaeda-Inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has ordered all girls and women between the ages of 11 and 46 in and around Iraq’s northern city of Mosul to undergo female genital mutilation, the United Nations said on Thursday.
“It is a fatwa (or religious edict) of ISIS, we learnt this this morning,” said Jacqueline Badcock, the number two U.N. official in Iraq.
The “fatwa” would potentially affect 4 million women and girls, Badcock told reporters in Geneva by videolink from Arbil.
“This is something very new for Iraq, particularly in this area, and is of grave concern and does need to be addressed,” she said, according to Reuters.
Tired of feeling trapped by sexist, misogynist assholes!
And here’s a story from The Guardian about how men feel completely comfortable telling women they do not know personally what or how to eat:
That so many women have reported this frankly quite incredibly patronising experience, is testament to the strength of the myth that a woman’s physical form exists, above all else, to titillate men. It’s the same mistaken assumption that lies behind the command to “give us a smile”, or the belief that a woman in a low-cut top must be looking for male attention.
As incredible as it seems, some women actually experience moments in their lives when their entire sentient being isn’t focused exclusively on providing men pleasure. They might wear a strappy top because they are hot, for example; eat a burger because they are hungry; or drink a diet soda because they quite like the taste. Explosive revelations, I know.
You might laugh, but for some, the belief that a man has an automatic “right” over the body of any woman he encounters in a public space is worryingly ingrained.
Should we laugh, cry, get angry — or start an MGM movement in reply?
When we started dating 14 years ago my now-husband drove me nuts with the phrase he still uses, (and which I now just laugh at):
“We could do one of two things”…
I’m sure — Broadside readers being a smart, educated bunch — some of you surely know, and can explain to me, the underpinnings of such a narrow worldview.
It feels these days as though everyone has joined one side of another. Our worldview is binary:
All or nothing.
Black or white.
Right or wrong.
Gay or straight.
Liberal or conservative.
Pro-choice or pro-life.
Gun control advocate or “gun nut” (not my phrase!)
It feels absurdly and, to me increasingly, stupidly, American.
Hello…Congress?
When most of us know, or realize, that life is a hell of a lot more complicated than that. It is shaded and nuanced. And our most firmly and fixed beliefs can change over time.
I had two moments of this recently, both within an hour, one on-line arguing, (and quickly withdrawing from useless online arguments), with some woman I don’t know in a on-line forum, and the other at my local hardware store.
I was struck, hard, by the realization how easy it is to fall into a habit of thinking (why?) in terms of either/or, not both. Exclusion, not inclusion. Narrowing, not expanding, our notions of the possible.
People who speak several languages and/or have lived for long periods outside of their home culture and/or are married to or partnered with someone of a very different background often move beyond this limited thinking because it is challenged every day.
What we consider “normal” is simply normal for us.
The first argument was over work and its relative importance in our lives.
Americans — especially those who have never lived beyond their borders — often feel that working really hard all the time is the single most useful thing to do with one’s life. Being “successful” materially is the classic goal. And a very skimpy social safety net ensures that few can stray far from the grindstone because unless you’re debt-free, rich and/or have a shit-ton of savings, you will soon be broke and homeless and then, missy, you’ll be sorry!
The woman I was arguing with, a manager within my industry, kept positing two poles — marathoner/ambitious/admirable or useless/annoying/slacker. For fucks’ sake.
Very few people love their work every day until they die. If they do, awesome! But making anyone who doesn’t agree feel the same way somehow less than, or imputing slackerdom to their ambivalence, is bullshit.
Some people actually work for the money. Not passion.
For many people — and not simply “slackers” — their true passions and joys lie beyond the workplace: faith, family, travel, volunteer work, pets, and/or creative projects that simply make them, and others, happy.
My second “Duh!” moment happened while trying to buy gray matte-finish paint for our balcony railings. There was only white and black on offer. The sales clerk and I stood there staring at the cans, my frustration growing, his boredom blossoming.
I was pissed there wasn’t exactly what I wanted — when it was right there in front of me for the seeing of it, and making it myself.
Black plus white = gray.
How embarrassing that it took us so long to figure that out. I felt like an utter fool for not noticing that right away. It was a great wake-up call.
Do you find yourself trapped into this way of thinking?
What would it take for you to even consider the value of the other side of an argument?
Broadside 