A place on the table

(If you received this blog by email, you might want to visit the actual site. The pictures work much better there. 

Just click on the title, “A place on the table”)

This summer, I’ve been on a serious return-to-fitness kick, trying to regroup from the long spell of inactivity brought on by last fall’s assorted orthopedic woes. I’ve been really conscientious about it, too, prioritizing walks and workouts and such rather than letting them take the last, left-over spots (if any) in my schedule. So today, after a nice lunch with a friend in Golden and before I got back to work, I planned to stop on my way home for a walk, thinking I’d probably do a loop on a local trail and call it good. But just north of Golden, I spotted the trail head for the North Mesa Trail. I’d never hiked it before (though I'd heard tales), and the steep initial climb really beckoned. So I traded lunch duds for walking shorts, slathered on sunscreen, and started climbing.

If you live in the Denver area and haven’t yet explored this trail (or rather, this web of trails), check it out. It does start with a serious uphill grade, but the almost immediate reward is great views to the west—that wonderful Colorado sky and the shadows of the clouds on the hills. But maybe the best treat for me was the pleasure of walking up a steep hill, settling into a steady-state pace, and discovering that my “training” has actually worked. If legs and lungs can smile, then mine were smiling. But I suspect my fitness regime is of far less interest than the scenery, so I’ll skip right to the nature tales and pictures.

From the road, North Table Mesa looks dry, rocky, and boring. But in truth, once you get up the hill and on top of the mesa, it’s really lovely. At least this year, with our ample rain, the meadows are soft and beautiful, and even mid-summer, the wildflowers and grasses are really nice. 

        

From the flat mesa top, you can see east to Denver and west to the afternoon clouds rolling in.

Around a bend in the trail, I was surprised to see a large-ish pond (in Colorado, we might call this a lake)—thanks, I suspect, to the abundant rain, since there are definitely no streams up there. 

I heard and saw lots of birds—meadowlarks, swallows, circling hawks, an American kestrel on a wire, a cormorant landing on the pond, and a bumblebee big enough to count as a small bird. 

And at the top of the highest promontory, the increasingly common rusty-legged signal carrier.

This unexpected adventure was such a treat—a trail I hadn’t walked, a beautiful day, and the sweet awareness that walking uphill is actually fun again. What a great day.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Civilized!

On Tuesday, the Colorado General Assembly voted to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples in Colorado. To understate the point, this is huge! It’s something activists in the state have worked long and hard to achieve. In this state, it’s made even more marvelous by the fact that just 20 years ago, some folks were calling Colorado the “hate state” for its passage of Amendment 2.

Back then, Colorado was notorious as the (to all media appearances) least LGBTQ-friendly place in the nation. In truth, that judgment was overblown—media frenzies do that. And in truth, Amendment 2 ended up having some very positive long-term consequences—including, arguably, Tuesday’s success. But no one could have predicted that just two decades later, same-sex couples would have that same state’s approval to form legal unions. It’s not yet the whole shebang, and folks were pointing out that it wasn’t marriage before the applause even died down. But it’s a step—a giant step—in this long trek.

Besides, for Coloradans this really is as good as it gets … at least for now. Civil unions are the greatest possible victory in a state that has an explicit constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. We’re not the only state in this particular fix. It’s one of several patterns in the crazy-quilt national patchwork of state-by-state laws that include legal support for, indifference to, and prohibition against same-sex unions of various sorts. The result can be a legal and logistic nightmare for same-sex couples, who may be married in one state, have no legal protection in the next, and see their relationship explicitly negated in a third.

Who can possibly keep up with it all? Well, conveniently, Sean Sullivan, a blogger for the Washington Post, has done us the great favor of summarizing the current status (well, current until Tuesday) of various laws and constitutional amendments related to same-sex marriage (ssm) around the country. To see where your state stacks up (and to be astonished at the piecemeal quality of marriage rights at this juncture), check out his blog here. These maps are really eye opening. Some of them are also clickable, if you want even more detail about your state—or someone else’s, for that matter.

All of this becomes really relevant given the pending Supreme Court consideration of two marriage equality cases, which I wrote about recently. It turns out that the potential impact of these two cases is greatly complicated by this legal hodgepodge. Right now, nine states and DC have marriage equality. The rest have an assortment of conditions ranging from constitutional and legal prohibitions on ssm through various partnership and civil union statutes (and various combinations of the above) to total silence on the issue. The two cases that will soon be considered by the Supreme Court may solve none, some, or all of these discrepancies among states.

One case challenges California’s Proposition 8, which rescinded marriage rights briefly accorded in that state. That ruling could affect only California or, in the broadest case, it could affect all states with legal bans on ssm (like Colorado). The other case challenges the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA; in all federal matters, marriage is between one man and one woman). It argues that it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to refuse federal marriage rights (social security, tax benefits, etc.) to married same-sex partners living in states where marriage is legal. This ruling could have a narrow impact (in just those nine states and DC). Alternatively, a broad ruling could ripple far beyond those jurisdictions, opening the way to broader enactment of marriage equality laws.

To add to the uncertainty, legal technicalities could influence both these rulings and their long-term impact. Basically, the court could decide these cases in a million different ways (approximately). If you’re curious about these things, here’s a pretty comprehensive discussion of the ins and outs of the matter.

Most folks who track these things carefully (which does not include me, except remotely) expect that the court’s rulings will not be so broad as to affect marriage rights in all the individual states. With the current court’s conservative leanings, we might even hope that the rulings will be narrow, since having a negative outcome from the Supremes at this point could stall the movement for a long time. In fact, some people argue that, given the recent rather steady—and occasionally dramatic—progress toward acceptance of marriage equality, we might be better off with the slow, steady slog of legislative and ballot box change. Whatever, hope springs eternal.

Stay tuned. The court will be hearing oral arguments on these cases on March 26 and 27, and they’ll probably issue rulings by June.

Thoughts from the think tank

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself immersed in a virtual progressive think tank. Well, not exactly. In a think tank, you’re supposed to contribute something novel to the tank. Mostly, I’ve just been soaking up other people’s ideas and letting them swirl around in my brain. I guess that makes me a think tank lurker. This may seem like a bit of a rant. But there you have it: my lurking mind in overdrive.

Most recently, I spent several days at the national conference of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, which, happily, met in Denver this year. My partner and I refer this group as “the radical sociologists.” My kind of people! I attended a bunch of sessions that renewed my hope that progressivism lives on in up-and-coming scholars and that academics can also be activists (and be proud of it … at least in this circle of like-minded academics). Among other topics, I dipped into discussions of the meaning of the concept of “social problems,” the subtle meanings conveyed by chat room conversations among butch- and femme-identified queer folks, the meaning of community recovery following a deadly mudslide in the Philippines, and changing meanings of “acceptance” of LGBTQ folks in religious settings (the last was our own work, presented by a couple of students we’ve been working with). A meaning-full several days, for sure.

The conference found me already in a reflective mood about things sociological, since I had spent considerable time over recent weeks hanging out with such topics here in Boulder. The focus of this year’s “One Book, One Boulder” program is Chief Niwot, also known as Chief Left Hand. The book, Chief Left Hand, is a biography of this Arapaho peace chief and the story of white people’s theft of Indian land in Colorado. In recent weeks, I attended two events in the “One Book, One Boulder” program series, and also visited the Boulder History Museum’s exhibit on the same topic. My first foray into this program a few weeks ago was the multi-media performance, “Rocks, Karma, Arrows.” I left that performance slightly stunned. I’ve known about how badly white “settlers” (a.k.a., invaders) treated the Indians living on the continent as we claimed (a.k.a., stole) more and more land and resources. But the explicit deception and cruelty of that period of history was sort of pinned to a bulletin board in my brain. During this performance, it was pulled down and examined in detail and with an immediacy I’ve rarely experienced.

Then, with that performance as a backdrop, I saw two segments of the film “Race: The Power of an Illusion.” This movie details how “race” became an identity category, which it hadn’t been one before we invented it (“constructed it,” as the scholars say). And then, how the stereotypes and degradations visited on non-white people were systematically shifted from one group to another as we (white folks) decided we wanted the land, the cheap labor, and/or the resources of yet another group. First, we wanted free labor from African slaves, so we created, step by step, a story that made them not just different in skin color but also deficient in mental and moral status. Using the wonders of newly emerging science, we even created (and I do mean created) biological proof of their inferiority. Then, the very same arguments were used to prove that other groups—Indians and women, Eastern European, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants, among others—were inferior. Funny … these arguments were pulled out just when each of these groups had something whites wanted or risked taking something only white men had.

Maybe the most powerful point in this movie for me was this suggestion: White people could have just acknowledged that we wanted free labor from African slaves and their descendants (or land from the Indians and cheap labor from other groups) and that we had the power to demand it. But we had this problem: the Declaration of Independence says, “all men are created equal.” Now, obviously, this excludes women (one of the battles of the 20^th century), but it should include all these non-white men. So, the trick was to justify their unequal treatment. To do that, we created a story about these groups, one that made them less than fully human. That way, they were not really included in “all men,” so we weren't required to treat them as equals.

It’s an amazing paradox. If we didn’t have this wonderful doctrine, "... all men are created equal," we wouldn’t have had to invent these stories of inferiority to cover up our sins against the founding documents. 

But given our supposed allegiance to this doctrine, we had to somehow paper over two conflicting realities: (1) we believe in equality and (2) our actions are rife with inequality. We pulled this off by simply declaring some people less than fully human.

     

And now, we live with the awful legacy of that process: even when the overt racism/sexism/classism waned (e.g., after slaves were freed, when the Indians were granted sovereignty in their “own” lands, when women got the vote, when labor unions gained equal treatment), those old stories about sub-humanity remained. We could free the slaves, but we still “knew” that they were inherently inferior to white people. We could give women the vote, but we still “knew” that they were inferior to men. The task we’re left with now is to figure out how to erase those old stories when the culture is steeped in them, and we’ve all taken them in with the air we breathe since childhood.

After all this, a visit to the Chief Left Hand exhibit at the Boulder History Museum closed the circle. It reminded me of the deep Colorado connection to this story of race. The the ease with which we've denied the humanity of whole groups of humans—and of their leaders, even those who, like Left Hand, craved, worked for, pleaded for peace. We’re walking on the land we stole from them as if it were our own.

This immersion in the reminder that racism isn’t “long ago and far away” but right here, in my town, in my time—in my self—was unsettling. But it was also energizing, a reminder of my own work yet to be done. Folks who live near Boulder still have a chance to join in this remarkable learning process. The museum exhibit is still open, the book is still available, and more “One Boulder” events are coming up.

Check them out here and jump on in. This think tank can always use more folks who believe in community activism—or simply in personal growth.