Retirement in the Mix: Resisting "Gone": 2014

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

2015!

I’ve been thinking about writing a blog to welcome the new year, and in the process, I realized that I’ve been a bit whimpery and cranky of late (other than the post about the glorious Sound Circle concert, that is!). Hardly the way to end a year or welcome a new one! I have a friend who learned this lesson from her mom: Whatever you do on the first day of the year, you’ll do all year. So, I’d thought I’d start out on a good note here. I’d love to do a photo blog of beautiful or interesting scenes from my recent walks, but since I’ve been hobbled for about two months now (oops, whimpering again), instead, I’ll do a quick review of my recent film itinerary. Just to prove that I haven't been sitting at home with my lip hanging down for weeks on end.

My partner and I often have great intentions to go to a ton of movies over the holidays, since that’s when some of the best ones come out. But we usually don’t get around to it because the season is too wildly busy. But this year, we have managed to see a bunch of them. Plenty has been written about all these films (and you may have seen many/most/all of them yourselves), so I’ll dispense with my incisive commentaries and just do a rundown with quick comments to give the flavor of how they struck me.

So here they are, in no particular order:

Gone Girl – Really gripping, too imaginably possible, scary to imagine that folks may actually be like this with each other.

Boyhood – So different, it was hard for me to get into it at first. But imagining the reality of it (this kid is not a character; his life is actually passing like this) made it very thought provoking

Foxcatcher – Ew! Excellent acting x 3, and creepy (not in the monster sense, but in the sense of how strangely distorted human lives can become).

Imitation Game – Among the best, IMHO. Really fine acting, important story with vast repercussions, awful how Turing struggled under the homophobia of his day

Theory of Everything – Mostly a nice love story, remarkable portrayal of Hawking. Not enough about his astrophysics for my taste (but then I’m weird in that way)

Into the Woods – Eh (shrug). I’d go to see Meryl Streep in anything, and some of the other characters were good … but I didn’t find it really engrossing or as super-excellent as I’d hoped.

Fury – I generally hate war movies (especially of the John Wayne sort from my childhood), but this is more of the “Saving Private Ryan” sort. Excellent and awful.

Interstellar – Incredible visuals, interesting back story (or is it the front story?) about the relativity of time, often very touching.

Night Crawler – Ew (again)! Sociopathy on display, really well (creepily) portrayed.

Unbroken – Great acting by hero and villain, fascinating story, certainly engrossing, good.

Birdman – I know it’s supposed to be great. I thought it was good enough, but weird. Maybe I missed something.

And, still to look forward to, if our current pattern of movie-going persists:

Wild

Still Alice

Big Eyes

Cake

Selma

Woman in Gold

We’ll be seeing one or two flicks this next few days, then several more will come out in January that will be on the list. If all goes well, the year will start with movie-going, which means I’ll get to keep doing movies all year!

I’m not sure if this is what my friend’s mom had in mind. I think she was referring more to making your bed and being nice to your siblings. I also don’t know if she was right about this January 1 thing, but it’s probably worth thinking about.

In fact, maybe I should try to add something more substantive than movies to my plans for the day. I’ll give that some thought.

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Thursday, December 25, 2014

The trouble with season's greetings

Perhaps my very favorite Christmas song is one I was introduced to several years ago by my partner, an aficionada of somewhat obscure music (as well as folk, pop, classical, you-name-it music). It’s called “The Rebel Jesus,” and it was written by Jackson Browne and performed with the Chieftains. You can find the lyrics here and listen to it here. The basic message of the song (at least as I hear it) is that Jesus was a revolutionary, a counter-cultural nemesis to the systems—governmental and religious—of his time. And that he got serious flack for this, but did it anyway. It’s also a challenge to us to do the same. I mention this song and my appreciation for it because it figures in what I’m about to say.

Let me preface this a bit. My own reaction to Christmas as it’s celebrated here is less than enthusiastic. Like many folks, I’m troubled by the overdone commercialism of the holiday and the materialism I’ve seen it foster, especially in kids. But I’m equally bothered by the unquestioned assumptions that are so easily made about Christmas—that everyone celebrates it in some way, that everyone is content to have it pervade their lives for a couple of months, that the ceremonies attached to it (trees and songs, gifts and greetings) are shared by everyone who does celebrate this day, that it is (or could/should be) a joyful occasion for all who recognize the holiday, that generic wishes for love and peace and hope that we so easily extend are applicable and meaningful to the recipients. All of these things make me less than excited when Christmas rolls around, earlier each year it seems. Yet, at the same time, I know that this holiday is hugely important to a lot of people and for a lot of different reasons—religious, spiritual, and social, as well as material.

So, as I considered writing about the topic I’m about to raise, I kept thinking of a line in that Jackson Browne song: “I’ve no wish to come between this day and your enjoyment.” And that makes me hesitate. I don’t want to “spoil” the day for those who find great meaning in it by sharing this experience. This isn’t a critique of Christmas. It’s just a moment I had that brought to mind (again) how automatic our greetings of the season can be, and how hurtful under the “wrong” circumstances.

Here’s the story. I have a relative who is currently in hospice with major brain damage. She has been expected to die for some months now, but she lives on. She’s more lucid on some days than on others, but for the most part, she lives in an apparent fog of drugs, brain damage, and confusion. When she is more alert, she’s frightened to realize her condition and depressed by what it means. Even during these periods of alertness, she is often confused about time, about where she is, and about who the people around her are. Most of her family live halfway across the country from her, but a couple members of her immediate family live nearby and visit often. During her periods of alertness, she recognizes them—enough to be weep in sadness when they leave after a visit.

So, I wanted to send her a couple of holiday cards so that her daughter could read them to her and then post them on the wall above her bed as decorations, mementos, and touchstones with reality. As I searched through the small selection of holiday cards I had on hand, here are the messages I found:

“May your home be filled with warmth and love this holiday season and all year through.”

“Best wishes for joyful holiday memories and a new year filled with happiness”

“May you have the happiness of simple pleasures at the holidays and all thought the year.”

“Merry Christmas and best wishes for a joyful new year”

“Best wishes for a holiday season filled with peace and joy.”

Which would you pick for her?

I searched the stores in vain for some better ones—simple greetings that didn’t invoke a joyful day surrounded by loved ones or a happy year ahead. In the end, I chose blank cards with colorful designs instead and crafted my messages from scratch.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the greetings on those cards. In fact, I sent them to other folks whose lives are more … um … typical. But the moment certainly made me think: Just how formulaic is our “celebration,” how standard-issue and empty of thought? And who gets left out, what lives do we make invisible by our generic holiday messages? Whose experiences do we disregard, trivialize, even demean in our use of these prescribed wishes for joy and peace, sent (or spoken) without reflection and without attention to the distinctive lives of the people we’re wishing these things for? I honestly hadn't thought much about this before, but I certainly have since.

It was a fairly stark reminder of how easy it is to be thought-less in everyday life. How easy to disregard the people for whom the season is not so joyous and thereby ignore the realities of the world we actually live in. I think of my relative and of others who are gravely ill, of people who have lost a loved one or whose home lives are anything but joyous, of those who are in crisis emotionally, financially, interpersonally, medically. Do we consider these possibilities as we convey cheery season's greeting? Or do we disregard them for the moment—in the name, perhaps, of keeping up the “holiday spirit.” I think of how easily the odd combination of the familiarity and the intensity of this season can evoke automatic actions, fitting or not. How irrelevant, or even inappropriate, the standard greetings of the season can be.

Still, with Jackson Browne, I have no wish to come between this day and your enjoyment. So please take this as a wish for peace and joy, of the sort that comes from daring to be a rebel. From using this holiday as an opportunity to be thought-full about what the day really means to you—and about what you really mean when you offer season’s greetings.

Meanwhile, warm solstice greetings.

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Saturday, December 13, 2014

Appetite

Artwork by Jeanne Mitchell

Last night, we went to the Sound Circle concert, “Appetite.” As soon as we got home, we bought tickets for the January edition of the same concert. If you’ll be anywhere near Boulder for the show tonight (12/13, if it's not too late), tomorrow (12/14), or January 11, I encourage you to go.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Sound Circle, it’s a 16-ish voice women’s a cappella ensemble, whose concerts I never miss. I’ve written about them here many times (just do a search for “Sound Circle” to see how many times), partly because they’re such remarkable musicians and partly because I always come away from their concerts with something itching in my mind, some morsel that I take away and mull over for a while. This concert was no different.

As I awoke this morning, and since, Appetite has been on my mind, new thoughts and associations attaching themselves to last night’s performance. The concert was a mix of music (with and without words), spoken word (including pieces by Sound Circle members and by others), body percussion, and a smattering of instrumental accompaniment (cello, guitar, percussion, and some amazing bellows-driven keyboard—maybe a harmonium?). It morphed from lively and robust to smooth and soft, from joyful to aching. And overall, it bore the tension between appetite and letting go. The risk of greed, the freedom to hope or strive, and the impermanence of life, of everything.

This morning, I’m recalling the cleverly arranged collective spoken word piece, written by a member of the chorus, “What do I want?”—which toys with that question: “What DO I want?” “What do I want”; “What do I WANT?”; “What!? Do I want?” And that thought brings to mind another piece called, simply, “Want,” one movement of a four-part work composed by Carol Matthews, titled “Seeking Enough,” which was commissioned for this concert and carries the theme of appetite through the performance. “Want” is a wordless evocation of the sheer, deep sense of longing, the wish for ... something. Something else, something more, something better, something missing. Appetite. It’s the yearning that can drive us to amass “stuff,” only to realize that nothing quite fills that hole. It lives in the urgency to gather power or wealth, to do drugs or alcohol, to collect and discard relationships, to seek the perfect body or hairdo, to wrestle for position or image. Always as if something, something could make us finally feel “fulfilled”—fully filled.

But the message of the concert is far more complex than an admonition to stop with the obsessive wanting. It’s also a gentle, even joyful celebration of the experience of wanting—of appetite that propels us forward to self-expression and engagement in our lives. An improv/spoken word piece by another chorus member, “My Best Me,” revels in her delight at reaching, daring an edge, finding a voice, feeling alive through improv singing. And another, also written by a chorus member (see what I mean about remarkable musicians?), titled “Shine,” celebrates the many forms of feeling powerful and empowered, of “shining” in ways that don’t involve the avarice and oppression that we often associate with power. And then there’s the sort of appetite that invites us to seek not stuff, but experiences. I was especially touched by a beautiful Mary Oliver poem called “Bear.”

Bear

It’s not my track,

I say, seeing

the ball of the foot and the wide heel

and the naily, untrimmed

toes. And I say again,

for emphasis,

to no one but myself, since no one is

with me. This is

not my track, and this is an extremely

large foot, I wonder

how large a body must be to make

such a track, I am beginning to make

bad jokes. I have read probably

a hundred narratives where someone saw

just what I am seeing. Various things

happened next. A fairly long list, I won’t

go into it. But not one of them told

what happened next—I mean, before whatever happens—

how the distances light up, how the clouds

are the most lovely shapes you have ever seen, how

the wild flowers at your feet begin distilling a fragrance

different, and sweeter than any you ever stood upon—how

every leaf on the whole mountain is aflutter.

- Mary Oliver

I’ve had that experience, or one much like it. A moment when something happened out there in the woods or the desert or the tundra, away from all the distractions and noise and “shoulds,” when I just knew that I’d remember the details of the moment forever. I want that. I’m glad I’ve kept it, have collected such moments, hoarded them, even. Tucked away from the everyday. And, for me, part of the beauty of this concert was the celebration of that sort of wanting, the kind of appetite that gathers glorious experiences, notices their impact on how we see the world and ourselves.

The concert then invites exploration of this paradox: appetite run amok can be destructive, yet appetite can also fuel inspired growth and expansive experiences. The contradiction is all around us—it’s especially relevant to this season, when rabid commercialism is daily juxtaposed with messages of giving and peace. But it’s also in our everyday lives, as highlighted by another spoken word piece by two (different) chorus members, “Spilt Milk Messages,” which plays with the mixture of admonitions and exhortations young children hear every day, advice that is familiar enough to draw chuckles of recognition from the audience and contradictory enough that the deeper message is crystal clear: we are taught from childhood both to want and to definitely not want.

A resolution is offered, too, not simple, but familiar: letting go. In fact, the last of the four movements that make up the larger commissioned work is called “Letting Go.” The message of impermanence, of appreciating abundance without being attached to it is a core theme in Buddhist writings, and this concert clearly calls on this principle. The program notes written by Carol Matthews close with this:

Lao Tsu says:

To know enough’s enough

Is enough to know.

Sound Circle will perform “Appetite” again tonight (Saturday 12/13) and tomorrow (Sunday 12/14), and then again on Sunday, January 11. You can get more information and purchase tickets at the Sound Circle website.

I’ll be going back for another taste in January, and I’m really looking forward to it. I trust that this anticipation is a sign of appetite and not greed.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Advice for the heart

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Just click on the title “Advice for the heart.”)

Beau Soir

When the rivers are rosy in the setting sun,
And a warm shiver runs over the wheat fields,
Advice to be happy seems to rise up from things
And climb toward the troubled heart.

Advice to taste the charm of being in the world
While one is young and the evening is beautiful,
For we are going away, as this stream goes away:
The stream to the sea, we to the grave.

– Paul Bourget

Last weekend, we attended a piano/flute recital in Denver. A beautiful piece by Debussy opened the performance, a setting of the poem above. The last two lines particularly reminded me of a piece that this same duo played last year, “Oblivion” by Astor Piazzolla, which also interwove images of water and the end of life.

Lately, I haven’t been reflecting much about aging and death—although, as those of you who follow this blog at all know, I often do reflect about those things. It just hadn’t been much on my mind in the midst of a million things filling my thinking space. Not, that is, until late October, when a total non-event knocked me for an orthopedic loop from which I’m just now recovering. That experience has served to remind me, in no uncertain terms, that I, like the stream, am destined to go away.

First, the story about my unexpected disabling condition—with some pictures of the delightful moments that brought it on thrown in to brighten it up—and then a train of thought about its meaning in the greater scheme of things.

In late October, we drove to Albuquerque, where my partner and a colleague were presenting a paper at the conference of the National Latino/a Psychological Association. For me, it was a few days to explore museums in Santa Fa and Albuquerque and Native sites I hadn’t visited for decades. Many decades. So, the day after we arrived in Albuquerque, I drove to Santa Fe and spent my time exploring the town and museums. It was a wonderful day of leisurely immersion in Southwest culture and art, followed by a lovely early-evening drive back to Albuquerque.

The view from Georgia O'Keeffe's studio

... and one of my favorite O'Keeffe paintings

Pieces from the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ... a surprising range of work, much of which challenged my expectations (stereotypes?) of "Native Art"

The following day, I drove back through Santa Fe and on to Bandelier National Monument, a canyon site of ancient Puebloan dwellings. I had been there as a kid, and much of it remained the same. The complex in the valley floor and the cliff-side caves in the soft volcanic rock were still there, as were the ladders inviting curious visitors (like me) to climb inside. On the other hand, much had changed—including, for instance, the name used to refer to this people, our understanding of their relationship to other Indian cultures and communities, the meaning of the petroglyphs on the canyon walls, and about a million other details. It was really fascinating to me, lover of “new history” that I am. Whoever said “history” (or, in this case, archaeology) is a simple and straightforward telling of the facts would definitely be challenged by repeat visits to sites like this.

Bandelier is near Los Alamos, home of the atomic bomb, so I spent some time hunting down a museum there, hoping for some insightful interpretation of the wrenching human consequences and moral dilemmas raised by the bomb that's said to have ended World War II. It turns out that Los Alamos is not a good place to find that sort of analysis. Instead, the museum I found celebrated our continued progress toward bigger and better weapons. Only one wall in a remote corner was devoted to critiques of the bomb—and that stood just feet away from the opposing (literally) wall, which detailed the arguments in favor of the bomb without addressing any of its the horrific and lingering consequences. I headed back to Albuquerque, stopping along the way to visit a roadside monument to the “Mormon Brigade,” a Union brigade that passed through here during the Civil War—which reminded me that I was close to Glorieta Pass, where Col. John Chivington, the leader of the Sand Creek Massacre (a recurrent topic here) started his run for glory. Mormons, Pueblo Indians, Spanish colonizers, the Union army, Plains Indians. Fascinating intersections of cultures all around me.

Then, on our last day there, I decided to stay local and headed out to explore museums in Albuquerque. I visited one small art museum and then began what I expected to be an hours-long stroll through a museum of natural history. As I stood in front of a panel about the birth of the cosmos (one of my favorite topics, as you may know from previous posts), I realized that I couldn't stand to stand any longer. I could feel that my knees were already swollen from too much standing and slow walking, and now they just hurt too much. Climbing the few stairs to the main floor just added to my misery. I went back to the motel, put my feet up, and read a book for the rest of the day, except for a brief walk along the Rio Grande. Thus began a long saga of weeks of swelling and discomfort, followed by a visit to the orthopedist, who recommended exercises and outlined a series of potential future treatments. Over time, the exercises might have helped with the knee issue, but in the meantime, they wrecked one (also rather beat-up) hip. Which is just now recovering, about a month after I did nothing to it other than some very gentle exercises.

Just to be clear, I’m very aware that these aches and pains and the resultant inability to do most anything with ease are small, very small, compared with the limitations that some folks live with—sometimes briefly and sometimes for a very long time. But small though they may be, they have served me well as a consciousness-raising, priority-sorting, wake-up moment. I am totally unused to having my days restricted in this global way. Over the years, I’ve had injuries, even surgeries, brought on by exciting events or simply steady overuse of body parts—especially knees—through an assortment of enthusiastic activities. But those were injuries, and the assumption—borne out in practice—was that they would heal, and I would resume my activities of choice, if perhaps slightly dialed back. But this was different. There was no event, just effortless, everyday activities combined with the slow, cumulative damage that comes with aging—this is a “condition,” not an injury. And this exacerbation was so non-exercise-specific in nature that it affected virtually everything I did. I couldn't walk a block or stand for 5 minutes without serious pain. I began to dread activities that would usually be ordinary— joining an out-of-town guest for a short shopping trip, showing her to security at the airport, walking to and from the car when I went to events, standing for a conversation with friends, helping with food preparation, grocery shopping. Fortunately, my partner has taken on more than her share of tasks, or I'd have had a lot more trouble getting through this spell.

So, not too surprisingly, all of this was fodder for a lot of preoccupied questioning. If this can happen from a non-event, I wondered, what does this mean for the future? Will aging now become a series of gradually escalating “conditions”? How likely is it that will this recur? Do I have to plan my life from here on out to avoid consecutive days of standing? And how long will it be until I can take a real walk again? (How easily I now romanticize the simple pleasure of a brisk walk!)

It’s an odd moment, one more element in the slow realization that aging is insistent, relentless. Like Bourget's river flowing to the sea. And its process is often surprising. I’ve always loved being active, so this seems especially hard, even “unfair”—as if we were guaranteed the sort of “fairness” that actually amounts to great privilege. On the other hand, I’m really fortunate because I’ve also always had other passions, lots of interests and activities that I’ve been able to pursue even during my pitiful misery of recent weeks.

Still, however I frame it, this experience has highlighted many life lessons: I’m incredibly privileged to have had a life of vigorous, joyful activity, and I wouldn’t trade those hours of enjoyment to avoid these past few weeks of whimpering discomfort. My “disability” status has been relatively mild and brief, and that’s a gift that many don't have—and that I won’t have forever. So, while I’m able, I’d better make the most of it, keeping in mind that some long day at the museum or some inviting ladder might one day lay me up for a bit.

And the bottom line: life and all its gifts are temporary. For all of us. Denial is a handy defense for keeping that reality at bay, but, like that stream sliding to the sea, we are inevitably going away. We really should appreciate the rosy water and the shiver in the wheat fields while we can.

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Friday, November 28, 2014

Thanksgiving, again

It comes around every year. Our annual thanks-giving day. And, as I’ve written here before—last year and the year before that—each year, I find it troubling. That’s true again this year, with my dis-ease heightened by my recent immersion in the story of Sand Creek—also a topic of earlier posts here, and of an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times and an article in the current issue of Smithsonian .

For those of you who haven’t been following this blog over the course of my recurrent musings about Thanksgiving, here’s a short synopsis. When we were living in Massachusetts several years ago, we attended the counter-thanksgiving ceremony at Plymouth, MA, which was organized by descendants of the native peoples who lived in that area when the Pilgrims arrived. Their take on that first fall harvest feast and what it portended for the future was—predictably—very different from the schoolroom stories I learned. If the European settlers at that the feast could have looked into the future, they may have seen the glorious future of a great nation. From the Indians’ perspective, though, that feast was followed by the devastation of their way of life, the loss of their land, language, and culture—and the predictable consequences: poverty, disempowerment, and dysfunction in their fragmented and diminished communities. And still, despite all this, they survive.

At some level, I had known this, but I hadn’t given it much thought, joining in the annual tradition of an autumn celebration dedicated to giving thanks and imagining that we celebrated the bounty of the harvest, the cooperation of communities that might instead have been hostile, and the launch of a new nation. Giving thanks is good, I thought—why not have a day dedicated to that activity? I never thought much about the fact that by choosing this day and wrapping the event in this legend, we were commemorating genocide.

I suspect this is not unlike the experience of many people.

The first really serious challenge to this complacency was the counter-thanksgiving ceremony at Plymouth. Then came the deeply experiential workshop we attended at the Quaker meetinghouse last year, which I also described here, when the brutal reality of the white march across the continent became crystal clear to me. And then came my education about Sand Creek.

Over the course of the past few weeks, following in the wake of our bus trip to Sand Creek, I’ve spent time with the Sand Creek story in a range of venues. I’ve been reading a book about Sand Creek, A Misplaced Massacre, which is written from a critical perspective that shines revealing light on the complex governmental machinations and personal ambition that fueled Sand Creek and other anti-Indian actions of the late 1800s. I’ve also attended a spate of events that addressed this massacre. This year marks the 150^th anniversary of the Sand Creek massacre on November 29 and 30, 1864, so the Boulder History Museum has sponsored a series of commemorative events. The first was a museum forum featuring an interview with former Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who sponsored the legislation that led to the designation of the Sand Creek Massacre Historical Site. Then came a video of the play “Rocks, Karma, Arrows, Part II,” which examines Boulder’s legacy of racism and exclusion (with particular focus on the Indians), followed by a documentary about that play that included some really smart talking heads offering pithy analyses of these historical events. And the last was a “history on the screen” event that featured a talk by the man in charge of the Sand Creek Massacre site, followed by a screening of “Little Big Man,” the 1975 movie starring Dustin Hoffman as a white man raised by Indians who witnesses the growing efforts to eradicate and dispossess the Plains Indians--including Sand Creek.

Each of these events has added a layer of nuance to the story and to my grasp of the chasm between the legend I learned as a child of the origin and growth of this country and the reality of the genocide that is this nation’s origin-al sin. One of the messages I took away this time, a point made on at least two of these occasions, was this: History is open-ended. History continues. This story is still being written, but now, by us. The implicit challenge: what will we write? How do we change the terrible trajectory of this tale so that the experiences of the indigenous peoples of this continent don’t continue to be silenced.

After attending the Plymouth, MA counter-thanksgiving ceremony, we made a commitment that we wouldn’t do Thanksgiving again without honoring this legacy—a commitment I reiterated here two years ago. (Blogging about it on a regular basis seems to be one of the ways I do this.) This year, a perfect opportunity arose. When we were invited to Thanksgiving dinner by a friend, we asked to include a piece that would honor the true meaning of the day, and she willingly agreed. So yesterday, we began the afternoon gathering of friends with a ceremony that recounted the real history of the relationship between European colonizers and indigenous peoples and ended with reflections on commitments we all could make to moving history forward in a more honest way. We included music—some of it raw and painful (Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “My Country Tis of Thy People You’re Dying”) and some chosen to create a calm space for meditation (pieces by American Indian musicians Calvin J. Standing Bear and James Torres). Afterward, we shared good, thoughtful, open conversation, a fine meal, and serious belly laughs over a word game turned silly by our delight in the camaraderie—and maybe by the release of tension after a difficult, starkly realistic opening to this complicated day.

As we were leaving, one friend thanked us for the ceremony and offered an observation, taken from her work elsewhere, on the contrast between the intensity of the days beginning and the lightheartedness of its end: “We can only work as deep as we can laugh.”

We can't act as though this part of history didn't occur or doesn't matter. But honoring it needn't leave us morose and perpetually somber, which helps nothing at all. History is open-ended. It's still happening. Only now, we’re responsible for where it goes. We need to act, act as if it matters. Because it does. And then, we can laugh as deep as we work.

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Wednesday, November 5, 2014

We who believe

I don’t know about you, but after tracking the election results, I went to bed really bummed last night. Colorado’s Dem Senator lost to a standard-issue red-state candidate in this recently rather bluish-purple state. Nationwide, Senate seats, House seats, and governors’ palaces turned red by the score. Talk of a “Republican wave” was in the air before the night ended. Hardly the stuff of a celebratory evening—or a peaceful night’s slumber—in my very blue view. As we settled into a disappointed sleep, this thought crossed my mind “Was this partly a reaction against same-sex marriage?”

We woke up this morning still bummed, and my partner voiced the very same wonder I’d fallen asleep with: Did our success—i.e., the progress toward equal rights for LGBT people—contribute to this “wave”? Was this a backlash against that, as well as against folks’ total dismay with Washington’s intransigent inaction? As she talked about that possibility, I was reminded of a message about social change, one I’ve actually learned from her. It came to me when she reminded me of how awful 2004 was—Bush (aka “W”) won a second term and nine states passed anti-LGBT laws, all in one election. I said yeah, but now, just 10 years later, over 30 states have same-sex marriage. And my day brightened. This focus on the long-term process rather than the moment’s misery came from knowing something about her research on anti-LGBT politics. She calls this a “movement perspective”—the notion that social change needs to be seen as a long-term process, not a single event. We didn’t talk about this emerging thought right then, but sure enough, after her shower, she told me her mood had brightened as she considered—independently, before we had discussed this—the movement perspective. We’ve seen worse before, she said. We’ll get through this. The task is to not stop working.

Social change is like a movie—an epic movie. Any given event—one election, one victory or defeat—is just a single frame in that movie. The movement for social justice has its ebbs and flows, it sparkling wins and its dashing losses. That is how it works. But viewed in the context of the long progress of what Martin Luther King famously called “the arc of the moral universe,” yesterday’s miserable outcome isn’t so devastating. It was just a moment, not the movement. We’ll be back. And that’s the challenge: we must keep coming back.

Thinking along this line, I was unavoidably (and conveniently) reminded of Resonance Women’s Chorus’ upcoming concert: “We Who Believe in Freedom.” The title comes from the lyrics of Ella’s Song, a well-known call for social justice written by Bernice Johnson Reagon and sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock. It’s based on the words of Civil Rights activist Ella Baker. The line invoked in the concert title says, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” The concert is framed as an invitation to consider how we need to show up for each other—a call to being allies, but also, I realize, a call to persistence and dedication. This election feels dreadful, but we who believe in social justice cannot rest just because we feel bruised.

This morning (finally!), I learned some good outcomes from the election: among them, Colorado’s “personhood” amendment went down to defeat (for, like, the third time), funding for a broad range of “safety net” programs was approved, and multiple school bond issues around here passed. To top it off, the incumbent governor, a Dem, won a very close race, defying the national redwash. A tough election cycle, for sure, but even here, as early as today, there are glimpses of that long arc. Believing in freedom requires that we keep our eye on that and not let the defeats get us down.

With that in mind, I believe I’ll think of this concert not only as a celebration of allies and of being present for one another but also as a rallying call for us all to not lose hope, to stay with the program.

So join us on November 15, 7:00, at First United Methodist Church of Boulder for a free concert celebrating social justice and our realization that we’re in it together and for the long haul. For more information, click here to visit the Resonance website

Because we who believe in freedom need to keep showing up.

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Friday, October 17, 2014

History lessons

You’ve probably heard about the brouhaha that raged around a school district near Denver recently. In case you didn’t, here are the Cliff Notes. A newly elected conservative majority on the Jefferson County school board floated a plan to “revisit” the AP history curriculum, their aim being, specifically, “to promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights.” Along the way, they wanted to ensure that teachers don’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.” In short, they proposed a return to the dead-white-men, American exceptionalism, might-makes-right, sit-still-and-memorize-glorious-heroes version of history. You know, the sanitized version where disenfranchised groups are invisible at best, villainized at worst, and our leaders always got it right.

The immediate result was some relatively calm protests in the form of “sick-outs” by teachers that closed a few schools. But then the students got wind of it, and their demonstrations lasted for days stretching into weeks. Their protests were undoubtedly fueled in part by the thrill of adolescent rebellion and a chance for a sunny day out of the classroom and into the news. But they were also enacting super-healthy and age-old resistance by youth to being told what they won’t be allowed to know or do. Fittingly, among the signs they waved were ones saying things like “This is what Democracy looks like!” and “Don’t censor my education.”

I thought of that story as I was riding along in a bus last weekend, gazing out the window at the passing eastern Colorado prairie, thinking about what this land must have been like before we arrived—“we” being the intruders from the East, the folks with pale skin, nasty diseases, and seemingly bottomless greed for gold, land, and dominion. “Manifest Destiny” on steroids.

I was looking at the scenery in this way for a reason: we were traveling with a contingent from the Boulder History Museum to a historic site that commemorates the Sand Creek Massacre—the only National Park dedicated to an atrocity committed by the US government against people it was sworn to protect. I’ve wanted to visit the site since I learned about it a year or two ago. We had considered visiting for Thanksgiving this year in homage to the “other side” of the Thanksgiving story. But the museum trip offered an opportunity to let someone else do the driving and also learn a ton in the process. It was a lovely drive, the short-grass prairie rolling by, alternating with green fields (alfalfa?) and tiny towns standing beside the railroad tracks and at the feet of grain elevators. Americana in the low autumn sun.

So, I was reflecting on this landscape and the prairie stories that have been silenced in standard histories. I thought of a long-time favorite book called Pioneer Women that I read many years ago (when I was way into women’s history)—an eye-opening journey through the little-known experiences of women settlers, the “other side” of the often glorified story of the “winning of the west.” That, in turn, reminded me of a blog I wrote recently about slaves in the Civil War, especially about a particular woman slave, and how unaware we are of their side of that story—though most of us learned plenty about the “other side,” i.e., the military, governmental, largely White side of that war.

All of these trains of thought came together in this notion of what we do and don’t know, what we did and didn’t learn—or in the case of Jeffco schools, what will and won’t be allowed in school children’s history lessons. Another excursion into the necessity of a more inclusive “new history.” Which I also wrote about here before. I was approaching Sand Creek in this way, wanting to know more about what happened there, and especially wanting to know the “other side.” My previous experiences looking at history through new eyes had been enlightening and mind altering. That’s the sort of knowledge I wanted to take from Sand Creek. And I did. It was an excellent day—informative, troubling, exhausting, and excellent.

I don’t want to dwell here on the details of the massacre; you can read about it here and more here. But a brief overview seems necessary for the rest of this to make sense. So … In November of 1864, exactly 150 years ago next month, as the Civil War raged in the east, the Colorado Territory was in the midst of its own escalating struggle. Gold had been found in the area, and settlers from the east poured in—and then decided to stay. They blithely occupied land that belonged—by treaty with the US government—to the Plains Indians. Some of the Native Americans wanted to expel the settlers; others saw their numbers and concluded that resistance was futile. They hoped for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. A large number of that latter group—several hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians led by elders sometimes called “peace chiefs”—gathered at a village in what is now eastern Colorado, assured that they would be protected there by Union soldiers. The lead chief flew an American flag and a white truce flag from his lodge.

At dawn on the morning of November 29—it will be the day after Thanksgiving this year—a large contingent of Union soldiers, led by Col John Chivington (ironically, a former Methodist minister) descended on the camp. Many of them were members of an untrained “100-day army” recruited specifically to kill Indians, who, in an echo of the enmity of the Civil War, were sometimes called “red rebels.” Throughout the day, the soldiers killed and plundered, chasing down fleeing people on horseback, firing howitzers at groups of women and children cowering in sand banks, beating, torturing, and mutilating. The carnage continued until they ran out of ammunition. About 200 Indians were killed, two-thirds of them women, children, and elderly people. Another 200 were wounded or maimed. The next day, the soldiers returned to claim the leftover spoils of the massacre—moccasins, headdresses, clothing, horses, body parts to display as trophies back home.

In the following days, the “battle” was celebrated in some quarters—including in the newspapers and on the streets of Denver. Before long, though, the government acknowledged that it had been a massacre—but did nothing to redress the losses. Sand Creek became a rallying cry for Indians across the plains, many of whom waged an ultimately futile battle to save their land and their way of life. More and more lands were taken to support the arriving masses, and the Indians were shunted into smaller and smaller territories, sent away from their traditional homelands to places that no settlers wanted.

I’ve long known something of how awful Europeans were to the indigenous people—here and elsewhere. And lately, I’ve learned more and more about how that genocidal push played out here, in my home state. In fact, I wrote about this topic in a blog last year. Still, this place on this day touched me in a new way. Maybe it was the beautiful sunny, windy day that so evoked those earlier times and the freedom of the prairie. Maybe it was the sense, as I approached the memorial hill that overlooks the massacre site, that we visitors were not alone there. That the spirit of the people who camped there that morning is still around.

I’m certain that it was, in part, the ranger who walked us around the site, whose deep appreciation for these people and their history was palpable as he told us stories about them, about the descendants of survivors, and about how the park services has worked to respect this site and their story. I had a hint of that sort of respect when we attended a lecture about the site earlier in the week. At that presentation and later at the site, I heard about how closely the tribes have worked with the Park Service in developing this place. So closely that the elders were called in to oversee the post-hole digging process when they put in a new fence. Why? Because the massacre site extends over many square miles, and the people who were killed—hundreds of them—were never buried, so human remains are still being found. That respect has served the project well. Recently, the tribes decided that they no longer needed to return every year for a prayer vigil because the site is now well honored and well protected.

But there was another dimension, too, as the story became more complex—and therefore more realistic. Not another good side vs. bad side tale, only with the sides reversed, but a story of human frailty and human compassion on both sides. Among the stories the ranger told was of soldiers who were dumbfounded and then outraged by the attack, soldiers who refused to participate, soldiers who were emotionally damaged by what they witnessed. Two of these men wrote about their experiences, and their letters, full of detail and anguish, are also part of the interpretive material at the site. The Indians revere these men as allies who understood the grotesque outrage of this attack. One of these men, Silas S. Soule, testified before an army commission investigating the massacre. He was subsequently shot in the streets of Denver. Although his murderer was known, he was never charged.

This sort of story was also part of the “new history” I learned that day. The first departure from the standard, sanitized version of Colorado History that I learned as a child was this awful event, undertaken in the name of … what? Power? Status? Proof of superiority? But more surprising to me and just as crucial to “getting” what really happened here was the second departure from a simplistic version of the tale. These are the stories I don't hear if I hastily, even self-righteously portray this event as nothing but a victory of evil over good. There’s another layer. Here, in the midst of this horror were soldiers, men whom we could easily equate with evil—but who refused to exercise their might, who risked (and lost) their careers and their lives by saying "No." Allies, to be sure. Even on what this ranger calls the “killing fields,” there were allies. And the tribes honor them, too.

And then, to return to the more obvious story—though one that was absent in the history I learned as a child—there are the stories of the generations-old pain, the lingering costs to descendants of the Cheyenne and Arapaho who were here. The story of the social worker who couldn’t understand the profound sorrow of the Native American peoples she was working with, didn’t know why they kept referring to “Sand Creek”—some event she assumed had happened in the recent past. Learning about Sand Creek, she understood. Add to the lives of the people who died here and those who suffered physical or psychic wounds on those awful days, add to those days the generations who followed, 150 years now living with the painful stories of an event that has only very recently even been known to most people outside the tribes, much less acknowledged. And yet, the Indians have maintained the wherewithal to organize an annual healing run from Denver, to oversee post-hole digging as necessary, and to shepherd the site that will finally acknowledge what happened here through the slow-moving bureaucracy that is the US Park Service.

I left Sand Creek feeling both exhausted and enlightened. All evening, I thought about what I’d seen and learned and about that sense of the people’s presence. I awoke with them on my mind the next day, and they keep returning. I’ll go back to Sand Creek. There’s more to know about what happened there, in all its complexity, and more to learn from the good people who are preserving that knowledge.