The Lessons of Mass Transit

My bus was late today. No big deal, right? Buses are late all the time. This morning was different though. I walked up to the bus stop, and there was a man waiting for the bus. He was Hispanic, and had a number of prominent tattoos. He was also not wearing nearly enough against the cold Minnesota air. Conclusion: homeless or can’t afford jacket.

I’m generally a fairly anti-social person, and so I sidled up to the bus stop quietly, pulling out my bus card and looking at the ground. As I did so, he asked me the time. I checked and answered, thinking he would stop talking. Instead, he struck up a conversation: when does the bus come? Where are you going? Do you speak Spanish? Eventually he ended up telling me about his failed marriage and his time in prison. Part of me was desperate for the bus to show up already because I am not a happy person before my morning coffee, but the longer we talked, the more I realized that I was grateful for the chance to simply be with someone I wouldn’t normally be with.

To be perfectly honest with myself, I judged this man unsafe when I first saw him. I judged him as someone I did not want to converse with. Because of mass transit, I was forced to rethink that judgment. I was forced to be kind to someone, to listen to someone, to share myself with someone. It wasn’t a big interaction, 15 minutes at most. But I’m grateful for it. I heard an experience that I would never have heard otherwise. I gained a perspective that otherwise would have been lost to me. And these things are not small. I exist in a world of great privilege, with other individuals who are well-educated and well-off. I want to have the best understanding possible of those who don’t live in that world, and this moment was illuminating for me.

This person was real. He had stories. He was vulnerable. He just wanted someone to listen, and that was all I could offer him at that moment. I hope that it was enough.

This to me is the most important benefit of mass transit. It removes you from your insulated world and requires you to exist in the world with all the other individuals that exist around you. We live segregated lives. Oftentimes they are self-segregated, but we spend our lives around people who are like us. Particularly for those who are wealthy enough to buy cars, we rarely venture into places that are full of people of color or people in poverty. When we walk past them on the street, our eyes slide by them. We avoid.

When you are travelling with someone, you cannot avoid them. Oh sure, you can put in headphones or read a book, but you cannot stop seeing them. You can’t stop seeing the person who is talking to themself, or the mother who is hitting her child, or the people yelling at each other. You can’t stop seeing the gentle father, or the man who just wants to talk, or the kind person who gives up their seat for the elderly. These things happen and you experience them. You have conversations with these people and you begin to feel the shape of their lives barely forming beyond your ability to understand it. You are challenged by the actual existence, the actual humanity in front of you, of those people who are different from you.

You might be afraid. You might be disgusted. Or you might allow yourself to be challenged to imagine the rich complexity of how they live entirely apart from you. You cannot hide from the nasty things in life when they are invading all your senses: the poverty, the homelessness, the desperation in people’s eyes.

This, I think, is why so many people are opposed to using public transit. Yes, it can be a hassle, and yes, it can be slow, but in reality, many of us don’t want to mingle. We don’t want to get “dirty”. We are afraid of the lives we don’t want to see.

So as Thanksgiving looms, I am thankful that I am forced to see things. I am thankful that each day as I bus to work, in a job whose explicit purpose is to fight poverty, I see what I am fighting. I see the people behind that title. I am forced to accept those people in my space. I am thankful that they are there, that I can hear them and that in some places, they will not be ignored.

Marriage is What Brings Us Together Today

Today the Minnesota Senate will be voting on marriage equality. There is a high likelihood that it will pass, and my lovely state will finally move forward into something slightly more resembling equality. I’m pretty excited about this, I think understandably, but occasions like this always make me stop and wonder why marriage equality is the huge push in the GLBT agenda. Obviously there are political and historical reasons for this: most of the people who organize this movement tend to be upper middle class and white, and the largest form of discrimination they tend to experience is marriage inequality. But in the larger picture of things, is it really useful to be focusing on marriage?

 

Many of the arguments that the right uses against gay marriage is that it will break down traditional family structures, and allow kids to be raised in different ways. They also are worried that it will destroy traditional gender roles, and leave us with a genderless society. Now to both of these things I say YAY. First and foremost, any family structure that allows for nurturing and caring of kids is a good family structure. Or even one that doesn’t involve any kids but just involves people caring for each other. Multiplying family structures is a great idea, because then people won’t feel frickin’ guilty for trying to appeal to different sources of help or building a family in the way they can. But a genderless society sounds even better! We’ll never get rid of the concepts of gender unfortunately (or at least I don’t think so) but the idea that we could allow for more fluidity, or the idea that both men and women could create identities that are both “masculine” and “feminine”, or the idea that people could be somewhere in between the two extremes of gender is great. People are suddenly not constrained by stupid arbitrary rules. People can go where their talents and interests lead them. Oh most beautiful of days!

 

But here’s the problem: marriage is not a particularly radical act. Getting married is about as stodgy and status quo as it gets. Continuing to create the family structure of two parents+children doesn’t really do a whole lot to expand the possibilities, and continuing the concept of pair-bonding with a single other person as your main form of commitment and connection doesn’t do a whole lot to multiply our conceptions of gender. The term gay even relies on the idea that there are two genders and you have certain relations to people based upon their gender. Marriage doesn’t do a whole lot to undermine a lot of the crappy structures we have in place. Particularly, it continues the idea that the government should reward those who choose to get married, which is a perfectly arbitrary thing to do. It continues to suggest that we can have only a single primary relationship in our lives and that it should be privileged above other relationships. And it continues a tradition in which women have been delightfully oppressed for centuries. LOVELY!

 

So while I think that marriage equality is a step in the right direction for society as it is now, and because it will make some people question things like the structure of family and the nature of gender, I hope that someday marriage will not be seen as privileged over other types of relationships, and that we can create a multitude of kinds of families and relationships that are viewed equally. I would love to one day see a family made up of a grandmother, a mother, and some children be treated equally to a couple who chooses to never have kids which is treated equally to a poly trio who adopted which is treated equally to a single individual who has many close friends. All of these are valid life choices and can probably lead to fulfillment and support in its own way. And I also hope that someday the labels gay and straight become fairly meaningless because gender is no longer our dominant form of identification. Maybe I’m red-head sexual. Who knows?

 

So kudos to MN for moving towards marriage equality, but for the rest of society…let’s try to be a bit more imaginative in our rebellion shall we?

More fiction! Hopefully to be a repeat feature

Drabble: Addiction

I have an addiction.

I don’t want to admit it. Addictions are shameful things. But I started going into withdrawal shock this morning and I can’t deny it anymore.

There is something in this world that I can’t live without, something that leaves me feeling calmer and higher and fuller. There is something that I rely on to pull the whirling merry-go-round of insanity from my head and make it into a roller coaster exclusively for my own use.

I have an addiction to writing. Don’t tell anyone. Addictions aren’t to be shared. Addictions are to be hidden.

Drabble: Truth

Hm. I rewrote Truth in a few different ways to explore different elements of it. I’m not quite sure which ones I like or what I like about them. Thoughts?

It starts again. She walks in to her room, casts her eyes around as if looking for something, and sits down again, her legs wobbly as usual. There was something she needed to do, but she became distracted again when she saw the bed and the window. She looks out the window, wondering yet again what could be outside. She looks around her room and glances around her mind and wonders yet again what could be there, again and again. She follows the circuit of her mind, hoping that it will narrow to the point of certainty, hoping for truth.

Sitting down again on her bed, she casts her mind here and there, tender yet desperate, probing every thought she had and every piece of evidence that might exist, touching before shying away. Whenever she is alone, she searches, and as she looks again she knows nothing is there. Yesterday she did not eat. Today she will not, because she knows. I won’t wake up tomorrow if I can’t find it! Her mind screams. She knows this is a lie. She knows she cannot help but wake again tomorrow and continue sifting through her own mind for truth. For certainty.

Sitting on her bed, she is searching. Sitting alone, she knows that something is there for her and she cannot find it. Alone, there is one thing that will befriend her and she has been seeking it for so long. There is one thing that she needs, and she will sit alone until she knows. She needs to eat. To eat. She didn’t eat yesterday. Yesterday her stomach was not empty enough and today she will ignore the pains to sit alone on her bed. Her stomach, her gut tells her that she is missing something. Missing the truth, alone.

 

I’m kinda stuck in drabble/poetry format right now because I have a short attention span and all of my longer motivation is going to work on what I HOPE will become a full length book (someday pretty please). If you have any prompts that you want to send me I would LOVE YOU FOREVER because I’m going to try to make this a somewhat regular feature.

And now for some haiku because the weather is driving me bonkers and what better way to write about the weather than with a haiku?

Water drips from eaves

Falling to the snowy ground

Where has the sun gone?

 

The branches above me

quiver gently in the wind

whispering for light

 

 

It can’t be snowing

I’m moving to Florida

Fuck Minnesota

 

I am trying to

disappear without notice

But you remain here

 

Drabble: Sharp

The lines tend to be blurred when he bothers to open his eyes. Sounds bounce off his eardrums like a kid jumping on a bed. Sights smother his face like pillows. When he bothers to remember tasting or smelling, things seep in, slowly, more texture than flavor. Through the softness, he wants something to cut. When everything bleeds together, he can’t focus and all he needs is a pinprick, a point, something of clarity. And so he quietly opens a drawer and removes a razor, pressing it against the pad of his thumb to make sure that it is sharp.

Pride

Libby Anne and Dan Fincke at Patheos have a pretty fantastic series going that stresses engagement and civic thinking. They’re both part of the atheist/skeptical community (as am I), and have been putting out biweekly prompts that ask other bloggers to consider ethical and civic questions of importance.

This week’s prompt is about pride, the value of pride and the nature of pride.

I have a peculiar relationship to pride. I live in Minnesota, and here in the great Midwest, we don’t really do pride. Bragging is anathema. The humble brag rules, and being too proud is definitely considered weird. In general, I have fairly negative feelings towards pride, although I don’t view it as a sin or vice in the same way that I was raised to view it (in a Catholic school). In my mind, pride always has the ring of bragging or being overly self-involved. I realize that this is not the dictionary definition of pride, but it is always how I have considered pride. Being proud of someone else is completely acceptable, but being proud of yourself seems immodest.

I do think that something like positive pride is hugely important, but I would prefer to call it self-respect. This is the personal sense that you have done something well, and feel good about yourself. You can recognize your positives and accomplishments. That is great. That is something we need to cultivate more of, since the culture that I live in is one of “never good enough”. Pride involves showing it to others in my mind. And sometimes that’s ok. Sometimes you want to share, sometimes it’s healthy and wonderful to share. But the important kernel is the internal self-respect that says you acknowledge yourself as good.

In general, I think that some measure of modesty is great. It’s quite easy to put others down by bragging about your own accomplishments, it often makes you look foolish, and recognizing where you can improve is great. I think that modesty is 100% compatible with self-respect, because self-respect is internal, and modesty is about how you broadcast things to the outside world. But as always, there needs to be a balance between these two extremes. Modesty helps you to respect and care about others. It greases social wheels. It makes you more approachable. But self-respect (even sometimes branching into pride) helps you care for yourself by letting you acknowledge and honor the things that you have done, by allowing you to rest at times, and by giving you an emotional reward when you do well.

Sometimes pride does serve a social purpose, like pride in someone else or your group. Generally, I believe being proud of ‘your team’ or ‘your country’ is a little silly, since you have no actual ownership of whatever they have done. Being proud of someone else usually means to me that you respect them for it, that you feel they’ve done well. It’s more of a congratulations than anything else, but on a deep level, a level that says you feel happy to be associated with them. I wish that there was a word for this other than pride, because it seems to have a distinctly different flavor to it than personal pride. Where personal pride is about feeling good about yourself or telling others about what you’ve done, pride for someone else is about recognition of what they have done.

There is also group pride, particularly for marginalized groups. I really can’t speak to racial or ethnic pride, because I am not part of a marginalized racial group, but as a woman and as someone with mental illness I can’t understand feeling pride over those identities. Again, pride to me holds an element of boastfulness. There is nothing to boast about with these things. I cannot understand being proud of anything you have not achieved yourself. I do feel compassion, respect, care, and community for the other people in these groups and for my role in these groups. I feel that for many of these people I’m proud of them for surviving. But I am not proud of my status as a member of these groups, because for me pride is reserved for actions, and it is to be earned. However where an emotion plays a positive role in helping someone to deal with their marginalization, I certainly can’t speak against it. For other marginalized individuals, pride might be very important, and I have absolutely no right to take that away from them.

In general, I wish we had more words for pride, to distinguish the emotions that it contains. There are very valuable elements to pride; recognizing oneself, giving oneself permission to rest or recuperate after an accomplishment, feeling good about oneself, respecting oneself, or recognizing a good thing another person has done. In general, I feel that all of these things can be subsumed under respect, because I don’t see what in addition to respect there is about “positive pride”. The prideful element that seems to be added is the boastful, bragging, or raising yourself over others. I’ve never understood the importance of tooting our own horns. Whenever I see patriotism touted as positive, or ethnic pride, I’m simply left wondering what for? Can’t we illustrate our goodness through our actions instead of obsessively patting ourselves on the back? There’s got to be a way to feel good about yourself without throwing a parade.