this crazy state

Yesterday I went to the post office to pick up a package. I stood in line between a woman talking on her cell phone (the woman happened to be Muslim), and an older man grumbling about the wait. (The older man happened to be Jewish.)

The grumbling man went over to some grocery bags sitting under a table next to us, and nudged one of them with his foot. The woman on the cell phone spoke to him sharply, saying those were her bags, and why was he touching them with his foot!? The grumbling man grumbled that he was just checking to see if it was a bomb. The man and the woman argued for a minute. He insisted that she not leave her bags under the table. "It could have been a bomb!" and the woman complained about him touching her groceries. Finally the woman went back to her phone call and the man went back to grumbling about being in line so long.

So this is the world we live in. We think grocery bags on the floor of a sleepy post office in a sleepy little part of the city might contain a bomb.  (Never mind why nudging a bomb/bag with your foot would be a good idea in the first place...) This is the world we live in.

This is why I hate the "See Something/Say Something" ad campaign that the police department has been waging at us for the past decade.

The odds of there being a bomb in a grocery bag under a table in a post office in a quiet neighborhood  (or under your subway seat or next to a garbage bin) are ridiculously slim. In fact, I don't know of any instances in which this ad campaign has led to an actual bomb or threat being reported and stopped. I know it was led to countless false alarms and terrifying waits for parents picking up kids, as it did to me last year.

I'm reminded of this great New Yorker cartoon, published in the months after 9/11.

We are all properly terrified, thank you.

I remember well the days after that one terrible day. I remember being told to "help the economy". Go shopping! Don't let the terrorists win! We would have done anything for our country then. We would have done anything for each other. We lined up by the thousands to give blood those days, even when we knew there was no one who needed it. But, instead of being told to help, we were turned away. Go shopping! And be scared. Be scared of your fellow passengers, be scared of white powder, of packages left by mistake in train cars, of anything "out of the ordinary."

Which is why we now have old men and harried shoppers arguing in post office lines over imaginary bombs, and we take our shoes and nearly everything else off to board a plane, and we have suburban police departments with tanks and machine guns.

Oh if only we had been all told on 9/12/01 to help each other. To sweep the dust off our neighbors' sidewalks, to gather at our chosen place of worship, to have community picnics or to visit the sick.  Instead we were turned away at the blood banks and sent to the mall.  Now we are collectively in debt, both material and spiritual.

Congratulations. The terrorists won. We are all completely terrified. Weapons drawn, we stare at each other over police barricades and imaginary bombs.

I have a fantasy of how that interaction in the post office might have ended... I imagine that the woman hung up her phone and laughed at the grumbling man's fear of bombs. That she picked up the grocery bags and showed him the fruit inside. Laughing, she offers him a pear, and smiling now, the man accepts, and takes a sweet bite.

Things that make me want to move to Ethiopia.

 Lately there has been a lot of bad news coming out of Africa. The tragic Ebola outbreak, the political instability in Egypt, ongoing wars in Sudan... There is a lot of bad news all over, it seems. But the news coming out of America is what is breaking my heart right now.

And making me pause a little bit longer on the "maybe we should just live in Ethiopia" thought than seems logical. Something I've thought about before.

It seems like America is pretty stuck. We're stuck in the blame the victim mode. Stuck in the 'War on Drugs'. Stuck on the "poor people deserve to be poor" mode. Stuck on the "guns protect us" mode. Stuck on the "black boys are dangerous" mode.

When we initiated our adoptions from Ethiopia, we went to lots of trainings. We read a lot. A LOT.  And a key part of the training was to prepare to have The Talk with our black son. Not the sex talk, the 'surviving as a black man in America' talk. How to keep out of trouble, deal with police at a traffic stop, not get into trouble at school.  How to be perceived as "safe" while black. I started having this talk with my son when he was 6 years old.  But now, I realize, there's really not much point these talks.

Because it seems like even if he was on his "best behavior", even if he was a good student, and stayed away from drugs or gangs or dangerous neighborhoods, he could be shot.

He could be trying to make a couple of bucks.

He could be in the toy section at Walmart.

He could be hanging out with friends.

He could be going to the store for an iced tea.

He could be killed because he is black, and therefore a threat no matter what he is doing.

selfie, age 5

And here's the thing: I think the police are stuck too. It seems that overly aggressive, brutal and violent policing methods specifically targeting African-Americans are rampant in many places across the country, including our home town. We moved into a mostly African-American neighborhood a year ago. I have lived or worked in 7 different neighborhoods in New York (middle class, working class, wealthy, immigrant, mixed up and in-between) and I never seen so many cops around. We pass a cop car, or 3 or 8, at least every day just driving home. I was pulled over for the first time in my life (for rolling through a newly installed stop sign) in this neighborhood.  I, as a white woman, am not in danger, but I tell you, it's very anxiety producing to see so many cops so often. And I don't think, for a minute, that there is more crime in this neighborhood.  Just more black people.  The police never seem to be doing anything, just hanging around waiting.

The theory is that if the police stop small crimes, big crimes won't have space to develop. Kind of like weeding. In practice, though, it means that cops hang around in "certain" neighborhoods.  They've got data to file and quotas to fill. The cops have a metaphorical gun trained to their heads about getting the numbers up or down in the correct columns.  They are looking for trouble, and wouldn't you know, they find it.  So we end up with neighborhoods like mine and like St. Louis filled with cops and neighbors and mistrust and fear.  Mistrust and fear leads to violence and senseless death.

Why is this? "All cops are racist" is too simple an answer and doesn't make much sense anyway. All people are racist, to varying degrees.  Racism is an inescapable part of our culture.

I think it's because we keep trying to solve the problem of inequality with the wrong methods. We try to solve inequality with education. As if learning to read better and early eliminates children's need for a loving, stable family, a safe home and nutritious food. We try to solve inequality by fighting a "War on Drugs".  Fighting against drug abuse with mass incarceration (three strikes, mandatory minimums, etc) is as futile as trying to carve the wind.  We try to solve inequality by "eliminating the welfare state". As if by magic, poor folks will be able to find jobs, affordable quality child care and affordable housing because we "cut the apron strings".

I worry about affordable, quality child care and I'm a tenured professional! 

We are throwing weapons at a problem, and all we are ending up with is a pile of weapons. A police state, jails filled up with black and brown folks, a fake "educational crisis", a society with a safety net made up of moldy lace.

The problem is that not everyone has the same amount of money. The problem is that it's the same folks who have all the money who also have all the political clout and control over the media. The problem is that most of the folks who have most of the money are white, and have been since we arrived here on three Spanish ships.

I'm praying for us to get unstuck. I'm praying we start trying to solve the actual problem we have: unequal access to resources and opportunity. I'm praying that cops realize that they have been pushed to use violence and aggression to solve a problem that is not their responsibility and perhaps, doesn't really exist.

Meaning, dear police officer, if you see my son 10 years from now, browsing the toy aisle and playing around with his friends, I pray, I pray fervently, that you will smile at him and keep walking, because you know,

he's not dangerous.

Playing impromptu coach to a group of 3 year olds. He wants to be a gym teacher when he grows up.

How To Eat An Elephant

one bite at a time.

Obviously. :)

This is what a dear friend reminded me when I fell into a whining despair over this:

What we liked to call the Zombie Apocalypse playground.

Because what I envision my backyard looking like is a little something more like this:

yup, if you just squint really hard, my backyard looks like this...

So it is important that I remember that this was once the view from my kitchen window. 

Midway through renovations our garage was a "storage site". Please notice the 1/2 dead plants.

What doesn't come across in these photos is the smell... which is decidedly CAT.  Did I mention that I once saw a possum wandering through the backyard? And that we found a termite "family" living in the garage?

So lately I've been doing google searches like this:

How do you keep stray cats from pooping in your plants?

(Quick Answer: With diligence, hard work and perseverance you might be able to persuade them to poop elsewhere, temporarily.)

Are you allowed to burn brush in your backyard?

(Quick Answer: NO.)

Possums? 

(Quick Answer: Shudder. But, they do kill rats. So... there's that.)

I am a wealth of information. Thank God for Google. And for the pest control specialists, tree removal service, fencing contractor, cable guy and telephone guy who have all paid visits to our house in the last 2 weeks. We finally finished tearing down that termite infested, humongous garage, and now we are dealing with what remains: 1/2 a broken fence, four dead trees, a whole bunch of rubble, tangled wires and mysteriously, a giant pile of broken glass.

The good news is: Not all of our potted plants died. Possums rarely come out during the day. And, that garage floor that we can't afford to have removed right now is going to make an awesome basketball court.

This afternoon our backyard looked like this:

Which, is like, at least 1/2 an elephant's worth of progress.

Someday I'll have my Zen garden. This summer we are going for a safe place to shoot hoops, and maybe grow a few flowers. 

So come on over! We are about to set up the barbeque!...