Brief Thoughts on Aziz Ansari and What The Heck to Do...

A partial address regarding the #metoo movement but mostly an address regarding the Aziz Ansari articles posted just about everywhere right about now, sourced from this article, about a woman named "Grace":

AP: The Washington Examiner

It's important to teach women and girls to speak up. To say NO. To say what they want. To say YES enthusiastically when that is what they mean. The problem, however, is that we've been taught as girls and women that saying NO can mean more aggression, more pain, more fear. What do we say to the girl who is in the car with a boy at night driving on a deserted highway and he pulls over to rape her? If she says NO clearly and loudly - won't this bigger, stronger boy still do exactly what he meant to do and no one will be there to help? Will she be safer if she goes along, stays quiet, pretends to like it? It is problematic to assume that any time she says no she will be respected and heard. 

She won't. She won't. She won't.

Should we teach it? Yes. We must. 

The reason the Aziz Ansari story is so huge is because it touches on all these things. We want there to be black and white. We want there to be easy answers. We want to be able to simply teach our girls how to be mighty and imagine that will protect them from predators. 

If "Grace" had spoken up with a strong voice and said

NO. 

I hate this. 

Get away from me...

Would Ansari have stopped? 

I'm going to say likelihood is high that he would. He did when she was most clear. But what about those times when your no is not enough. When your pushing away is not enough? When you are alone and there is no one to hear you screaming? When the person you are with is not there to respect you or trying in any way to be a "good person"? And how do we teach girls what the heck to do? And how to know the difference?

I am publishing this here because I do not know the answers, but I am so so grateful that we as a society are finally having this conversation.

IT'S ABOUT TIME.

It is time.

It is time.

#metoo

#timesup

In Which We Wake Up From A Nightmare and Donald Trump is Still President.

I haven't blogged in months. 

I haven't blogged here in...  I guess you'd call it years.

What's that mean?

I don't really know how to talk about it.

I've been going through enormous changes.

I've had thoughts and feelings and life altering conclusions surrounding marriage and relationship and capitalism and Christianity that I will have to take some time to process even further before I let them out of the bag for this readership.  Are you still out there?  Are you still thinking about God and bigger things than humanity and working and working and working?

I haven't stopped thinking about all the things separate from what I was told was absolute truth growing up and how it's all sort of shattered around me.  I sit here now, in the middle, trying to put the pieces together to make something else.  Something...  better.  Wabi Sabi?

And every morning I wake up.  The makings of my old cocoon still lying about me in spite of my new butterfly wings and that man is still in the White House.

When he was elected last November I was teaching a homeschool co-op class.  We were focusing on literature revolving around World War II and we were reading Number the Stars by Lois Lowry.  I had a class of youngsters with bisexuals and lesbians and Christians and atheists and gifted kids and disabled kids and kids from all sorts of backgrounds and when they showed up that morning for co-op many of them were bleary eyed from crying.  There was a real fear in the air.  Fear from ten year olds who weren't sure if their parents would still be allowed to be married in the months to come.  Fear from kids with chronic health conditions whose only hope was the ACA and now there was someone at the very tippy top of the power chain saying that he was going to do everything in his power to take that away.  We canned our lesson for the day and my co-teacher and I showed Hillary Clinton's concession speech.  It spoke about hope for young girls.  That they still deserved to do all the things they'd ever dreamed of doing.  But it felt so hollow.  She'd lost.

Was she the perfect candidate?  Of course she wasn't.  Those don't exist.  They aren't real things.  They exist in stories only because life is filled with disaster and messes and blowjobs with interns and making mistakes.  But she was a woman.  She was the first one in a major party I knew of who got this close.  It felt like it was really going to happen.  That the United States was going to stand up and say that a woman could truly do anything in this world.  She could hold this most powerful office.  She could really do it.

And the concession speech felt like an episode of the Twilight Zone because this pussy grabbing game-show host was now being sworn in.  Was now passing executive orders.  Was making claims that our country was something I'd grown up thinking it wasn't. 

I'd always been a proud American.

I loved learning to fold the flag properly and participating in the flag ceremony as a ten year veteran of the Girl Scouts of America. 

I wept when the plane touched down on American soil after my amazing trip to Ireland - while I loved Eire it was America - this United States - that was home.

And now how could I justify my pride in my country?

What has it come to?  Here and now?

A president who stands behind child molesters and who makes grand swipes with his pen without much understanding about what he's doing or much care for who he's hurting.  A man who condones the behavior of Nazi's and Nazi sympathizers but refuses to stand behind hard-working Americans in their hours of greatest need.

I had an American Dream.

And people can say that this country has never really been what it promised to be - but the potential was always there.  There was always hope.  It always felt like we could end up on top again and our education system could be fixed and healthcare system healed and military prowess turned inward to develop this nation in science and mathematics and innovation instead of nuclear bombs and sniping drone technology.  It felt like...  things could be different here.  This is a nation with so much potential.

But this year.  This 2017.  It has not felt that way. 

It has felt like a place I am ashamed to say I am a part of.

A place where I don't feel like my government cares about me at all.

A place where I feel like if anyone really knew me, I would be the opposite of welcome.

I still...

I still wish.

Is that the same as hoping?

A few months ago a friend of mine from my days in college hanged himself in the woods from a high branch in a tree.

There was a lot of controversy surrounding why he chose to take his own life.

He was found days later.

Not hours.

Not the same day.

His sister didn't know if they should have a closed casket at the funeral.

He hanged himself and a stranger found him there.  Dangling.  Dead.

Somehow that image feels like this whole bloody 365 day insanity.

There is not much left to make sense with.

I have a low burning rage that is constant.  Sometimes it bubbles over and I do something like attend the Women's March or make an angry sign or post something or share an article or protest down town.

But it all feels empty.

Like the hanging.

Like signing my name again to a petition begging our representatives to not do away with net neutrality.

Like the stack of medical bills on my counter because I had to get an MRI because the doctor thought I might have had a stroke.  I didn't have one.  But the MRI still cost money. 

Like reading about healthcare in other first world countries and feeling like my own country no longer belongs on a list that talks about the first world.

Is America great?

Have we ever been great?

I don't know what it means.

I don't know what it means when a man with a MAGA hat sits down in my favorite tea shop in the middle of my liberal leaning town among the pictures of Hindu goddesses and sips tea like it's fine and he belongs there.

Who belongs anywhere, anymore?

I'm sorry this blog isn't filled with guru wisdom and pages of easy answers.

I don't have them now.

Just questions.

So many bloody questions.

Last night my daughter couldn't go to sleep.  She was worried about improbability of infinity and the likelihood that there is a drop off to the universe in which there is an endless chasm of nothing.

In that chasm my friend is hanging.

He's alone.

Donald Trump is president.

And it's morning.