Profanity, Civility, Community

(This is where I would have embedded George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on TV," but it's an age-restricted video you can watch only by going to YouTube.)

The Washington Nationals' home opener last Friday, against the World Series-winning Los Angeles Dodgers, started spectacularly well: two shut-out innings from starting pitcher Miles Mikolas, three unanswered runs from the Nationals including C.J. Abrams's home run. It hardly mattered that half the people in the ballpark were Dodgers fans. 

And then the game took a turn. Mikolas collapsed, setting a new club record for runs given up by a single pitcher (11). The Nationals' new manager, wunderkind Blake Butera, didn't pull him until the fifth inning. The bullpen kept the Dodgers to only two more runs, but the final score was a demoralizing 13-6. 

Somewhere around the seventh inning, a man in the row behind me lost his patience. He started bellowing that the Nationals should be ashamed, that this was a disgrace, that the managers and players were bums. He was loud, relentless — and profane. The Nationals weren't just a disgrace, they were a fucking disgrace. The game was a fucking disaster. The owners were fucking robbers, and the whole thing was a fucking insult to the fans. 

Eventually another man across the aisle, a season-plan holder I think of as the Mayor of Section 100, told the heckler to shut up, or at least to quit cussing. "There are kids here." 

The heckler took offense. He was much the worse for drink (which was pretty impressive since even American beers cost just under $15 apiece at Nats Park these days). The two men stood up and confronted each other. 

Eventually an usher noticed the disruption. When he came down, the heckler insisted that he'd been insulted. He refused to back down, calm down, quiet down, or moderate his language. He demanded that the usher call the police. 

Everyone told the man that no, he didn't want the police. Seriously, dude. Just settle down. Don't make this a thing. 

But since the heckler insisted, the police came — and took him away in handcuffs, as he protested the unfairness. A rotten way to end a day that was supposed to be nothing but fun.

The thing is, the guy wasn't wrong. It was a miserable performance before a sellout crowd. Butera should have pulled Mikolas after the third inning, though even that might not have been soon enough. Hell, Mikolas probably shouldn't have had the ball that day at all. But the combination of rage and alcohol made the angry fan feel it was okay to use whatever language he wanted in an environment that included small children, and most of us in 100 were grateful when the Mayor spoke up. 

Yesterday the President of the United States posted a threat of war crimes against the people of Iran unless they opened "the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards." And I posted a comment to BlueSky that the President was using language most of us wanted to keep out of our children's mouths — to which, because it was BlueSky and that's the nature of that community, a complete stranger snarked at me for taking offense to the language. 

But the language matters. I'm as sweary as the next person when the situation calls for it, but language is always a tool. Language conveys not only what we think and feel about what we're saying, but also what we think and feel about our audiences. It conveys who we are. And it expects a response. 

Words' meaning and power change over time, but we identify members of our community in part by agreeing on acceptable usage. Last Friday, Section 100 got a reminder of our microcommunity's acceptable boundaries. Yesterday, the President of the United States scoffed at them.

The Cautionary Tale of Constance Mayer

 

The Soul Breaking the Bonds of Earth
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, 1821-23 

The Louvre is almost mandatory on one's first trip to Paris, so off we went on a Sunday morning last month. Had I visited the Louvre on my first day in Paris, my impressions of the city might have been very different. I'd already had three days of Paris as open, intimate, and unexpected. The Louvre is a literal fortress full of looted treasures, crowded with people who feel obligated to be there and are apparently incapable of looking at art except through a phone screen. Why, why does anyone need to take a cellphone photo of an artwork? Will they ever look at it again? Could a cellphone photo possibly be better than the postcard that costs a single Euro in the museum gift shop? Je n'ai aucune idée, non, et non.

The irony is that I did try to take a photo of this painting — and somehow my phone did not save it. (Of course the Louvre is haunted. It's probably as crowded with ghosts as it is with people.) I'd never seen this painting before, nor heard of the artist. This image is from the Louvre's website, but does not do the painting justice. What caught my eye was the brightness of the white paint used for the central image and the cascading water below. The painting in real life is bluer and darker than it looks here, and the white is correspondingly brighter. 

This was Prud'hon's last work, left unfinished when he died. It seems to have been a response to the suicide of his collaborator and longtime companion, Constance Mayer, who slit her throat with his razor in 1821. Mayer, 16 years younger than Prud'hon, had been his pupil, then became his housekeeper and raised his children after Prud'hon's wife was committed to an insane asylum. When Prud'hon's wife died, Mayer understandably assumed that she would become the next Madame Prud'hon. Prud'hon made it clear he had no intention of marrying again, sending Mayer into a suicidal depression. After she died, Prud'hon organized an exhibition of her work, returned to paints to create this remarkable image, and died himself — of alcoholism, apparently, though some say it was a broken heart — less than two years later.

Scholars agree that Prud'hon and Mayer worked closely together from 1804 until her death, and that Mayer painted some, most, or all of several works credited to Prud'hon during that time. Prud'hon preferred to work in pencil and chalk; Mayer was a painter. He would draw an image, and she would paint it. His was the more famous name, though she exhibited her own work, and that work hangs in galleries around the world. Paradoxically, her paintings seem to have survived better than his have; he was apparently bad at mixing pigments, and his paintings have darkened. Except for these flashes of white on the painting he left unfinished.

. . . .Aaaand we're back.

After almost ten years of salaried work, a reorganization has put me back into full-time freelancing. 

If I've ever told you I simply didn't have time for your project, that's no longer true. I have time, and I want to help. I want to see your manuscripts and projects and help them be whatever they need to be. 

In the meantime I get my own voice back, after hiring it out to employers for years. The world is a marvelous place, and I've been on it a while. I have Thoughts. I'd like to hear yours. Watch for new posts on a regular basis, and chime in through the comments. 

Meet me at Mary's Place

I spent this weekend on retreat with other members of my church, talking about how to strengthen communities under the guidance of the extraordinary Sister Simone Campbell.

The second requirement for prophetic communities, Sister Simone told us, might be the hardest of all: the need to “touch the pain of the world as real.” That is, experience it without trying to fix it; letting it break your heart. “Having a broken heart makes room for everyone.”

This morning I’m sitting two blocks from the Pentagon, remembering that day 22 years ago, letting it break my heart again. Nothing we have done in the last two decades has made an attack like that any less likely. It might be minimally more difficult to execute a plan like the 9/11 attack than it was in 2001, but no one who was truly determined could be deterred. All deterrence measures assume that the attackers want to survive. That wasn’t true in 2001, and it’s not true now.

So how do we live broken-hearted? What are we supposed to do, if not try to fix things? We are supposed to build community. We are supposed to broaden that community. We are supposed to love our enemies, even when they lie and persecute us. The instructions are right there in the New Testament. Jesus gave them to us, and he was not equivocal. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

How do we form that community? We come together with radical acceptance. We listen. We celebrate. Coming together makes hope possible, because — as Sister Simone reminded us — hope is a communal virtue.

Bruce Springsteen’s album The Rising, which I always listen to on this day, gets it. It starts with a lonesome day; it moves on to Mary’s Place.

            Tell me, how do you live brokenhearted?

            Meet me at Mary’s place. We’re gonna have a party.

 

Turn it up. 

 

 

A Homily on the Prodigal Son

I missed going to church during the pandemic lockdown in 2020. I'm a haphazard and occasionally defiant Catholic, but that's kind of the point. In college, a Jesuit suggested that sin and redemption might be a dialectic process that brings us toward God. I wouldn't want to go too far down that road, but it comforted me at the time. 

Anyway I found a faith community that suited me, a non-diocesan parish in Northern Virginia that was holding Mass online. They've been a lovely, welcoming, safe group, one of my pandemic treasures. Liturgy planning is a cooperative effort with a regular rota of order priests, the "padre cadre." A few Sundays a year, we don't have a priest, and instead of Mass we have a community-led liturgy. We had one yesterday, for the fourth Sunday of Lent, and I got to be part of the planning team. Not only that, but I got to give the sermon. 

Yesterday's Gospel was Luke's telling of the story of the Prodigal Son — but instead of beginning with the words of Jesus, as we usually hear that story (Luke 15:11), the reading included Luke's own reporting about Jesus's audience and purpose. That piece of the story feels meaningful to me, so that's what I talked about. And since I'm unlikely to do this again, I share the homily here for anyone who might need it. 

* * * * *

I am a writer and an editor, working in a broad range of environments—I work on everything from legislative hearings to social media posts about sports. It’s all storytelling, and my first question on every project is, “Who is this for?” Who’s the audience, and what is the audience supposed to do with this communication? 

 

I was so glad that we got this version of the Prodigal Son story today, because the chapter opens with Luke telling us who the audience for this story was: not the tax collectors and sinners, who were already hanging out with Jesus and listening to what he had to say, but the Pharisees and scribes, who were complaining about Jesus spending his time and wisdom on people they found unworthy.

 

When we hear a parable or a fable, we identify with a character based on the lesson we think we’re supposed to learn. The most obvious message of the story of the Prodigal Son is that God will always forgive us and welcome us home. That is a powerful message, and that is a message we all need to hear, that God offers this absolute and radical forgiveness. But the way that Luke frames this story makes it clear that this was not the only message Jesus was trying to deliver, and was maybe not even the most important message for the audience he was addressing.

 

The people Jesus was speaking to were the people in the position of the faithful son. And what does the father say to the faithful son? He says, “You are with me always, and all I have is yours.”   

 

You are with me always, and all I have is yours. Not half. Not “your share.” All I have is yours. 

 

This is what Jesus was telling the Pharisees and scribes: all God has is yours. The forgiveness of the prodigal takes nothing away from you.

 

I grew up in a family of six children. We fought constantly over “fair shares.” My father threatened to get a food scale to make sure that nobody got even a little bit more ice cream than anybody else. God does not need to do that, because God is infinite. God’s love is infinite. God’s forgiveness is absolute. God’s forgiveness of and love for other people takes nothing away from us. And God invites us, like the Prodigal Son’s father, to join in celebrating that love, celebrating that forgiveness, welcoming everyone home again. 

 

In this story, we see ourselves as the prodigal son, being forgiven, because we know we need that forgiveness so badly. But we must also recognize that we are the brother, who needs to get a grip, and realize that forgiveness and love are not ice cream. Nothing God gives anyone else subtracts from the infinite love and forgiveness we get every moment of every day. We are invited to celebrate that radical forgiveness, and if we aspire to be more like Jesus, we must find that radical forgiveness in ourselves as well. And so we are called to be the prodigal son—and the prodigal’s brother—and the prodigal’s father. We are all three people in that story.   

 

So let us all celebrate and rejoice—because we, and our brothers, and our sisters, have all been dead and restored to life. We have all been lost, and now are found. 

 

Alleluia.

 

Regaining Momentum

Thursday broke me. 

It was a small thing on top of a lot of big things. My laptop stopped charging, and when the battery died, I could not revive it.  

My day job is full-time when Congress is in session, and I have a year-round, full-time editing/consulting business of my own. I work all day, and sometimes I work all night. My sense of self is way too wrapped up in my work, and my work is no longer really possible without a computer.

I've tripped over the charging cord more than once, so I figured — I hoped — replacing the cord would fix the problem. But I work on a MacBook, and all the Apple stores are closed, and Apple couldn't deliver a new cord before Wednesday. 

I ordered one from Amazon that advertised same-day delivery, but once the order was placed, the delivery date changed to Friday — and later, to between Saturday and Monday. Best Buy couldn't deliver the cord until Wednesday, but I had an adapter I thought I might be able to rig up as a workaround with the right USB cable, so I went to my neighborhood Best Buy to buy one of those. As it turns out, Best Buy is not really open yet — you can order online and pick up your purchase at the store if they have it in stock — but the lady behind the acrylic shield at the entrance was very nice, and I got my cable. Which did not work.

Since this is 2020 and I am a creature of privilege, I do also have a smart phone and an iPad, so I could answer email and could call in to a Webex meeting. But I haven't learned how to write anything longer than an email on my phone or my tablet, and I don't know how to mark changes on a document in anything but Microsoft Word. 

"You need a vacation," said one of my colleagues on the Webex call, and my eye started to leak. What does that even mean, in this environment? How is anybody taking a vacation? The country's falling apart, I'm alone in this apartment, I have no means of transportation other than the half-open Metro, and I have all this work that isn't getting done . . . 

And then, at 7:30 Thursday night, I tuned into the tribute to John Prine streaming on YouTube and Facebook, and Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires opened the show with "Hello in There." And I lost it, for the first time since this lockdown began.

It was an ugly cry, and I can't even list all the things I was crying about. The loss of John Prine, absolutely. The tens of thousands of people who have died from this virus, and my friends who still aren't completely well. The loss of our old life. The loneliness of lockdown. The hatefulness, selfishness and willful obliviousness of my fellow Americans who put that mindless, malicious man in the White House. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and every other black person killed by figures in authority over the past 400 years. The fact that my daughter's going back to Asia next week and I never even got to hug her while she was home. I could go on. I did go on. I went on to the point of thinking, "Okay, I need to stop crying now," but I could not. Eventually it ran down. 

My day-job boss brought me a PC laptop from the office, so I managed to write Friday's weekly newsletter. I got the MacBook power cord yesterday evening, and it did fix the laptop, and today I need to catch up with two and a half days' worth of missed work.  

But three days later, I still feel shaky. I'm afraid that having stopped I won't be able to get started again, because momentum is the first law of motion. I remind myself that this — all of this, life, work, the fight for justice, everything — is a marathon, not a sprint, and it's not all supposed to get done today. In the words of the Mishnah sage Rabbi Tarfon, "It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it." 

So my laptop is recharged. I'm about to open my email folder, with a sense of dread. Dread about what? Nothing I work on is a matter of life or death, but I do feel entrusted with my clients' hopes and aspirations, and I take that seriously. Plus, the work makes it possible for me to make contributions to organizations like NAMI, one of the beneficiaries of the John Prine tribute, and more essential now than it's ever been. 

Back to it. 

 

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story

I have five brothers and sisters, and five of us were born within four years (two sets of twins, one singleton born on the second twins' first birthday). Until I was almost 21, I lived surrounded by people, with a roommate of some kind or in a dormitory. So I learned early about points of view.  

My five siblings and I grew up in the same house and share memories of certain major events. If you ask about them, though, each one of us will tell you a different story — and they will all be true. 

Stories are all about whose story you're telling, and where you place the camera. Recent years have seen something of a craze for first person, present tense narratives, which some authors find easier to write but I often find excruciating to read — because seriously, who's that interesting? When I read fiction for pleasure, more often than not I want that panoramic view. Third person omniscient, that's my jam. 

This is the conversation we're having right now about statues, and about renaming things. George Orwell said that "History is written by the winners," but if that's true, why are my nephews going to Lee-Davis High School? Why does my niece go to Stonewall Jackson Middle School? Why does Richmond still have a giant statue of Robert E. Lee in the fanciest part of town?

These are not new questions, but people seem to be realizing it's stupid to still be asking them in 2020. The statues are getting dumped into rivers. The rec center in Henrico County that used to be called Confederate Hills became The Springs today, with no fanfare. And of course, the intersection of 16th & H Streets NW is now Black Lives Matter Plaza.

To the people wringing their hands about these changes and wailing that we're destroying history, I ask: whose history? We're not changing any history. We're making more, and we're moving the camera.

Everybody stars in their own life story. Too many people have lived and died unseen and unremembered. If we restore the balance, that's improving history, not wrecking it. Be honest: how much did you know about Alexander Hamilton before the musical?

Why We Can't Think Straight

At the Arlington NAACP rally the other day I ran into someone I know, but I did not recognize her. She was wearing sunglasses and a mask, so I don't feel too bad about that, but even after she teased me about not recognizing her, I could not remember her name. I still can't remember her name. I know how I know her. I know her Twitter handle. But I cannot remember her actual name. 

I wish this was a rare occurrence, but it's happening more and more often. Another friend told me that it's happening to her too, and in exactly the same way: she can't keep a series of numbers in her head, she can't remember who's spoken in a meeting she's running. 

On this sample size of two, I infer that this is a widespread problem. It helps me a little, though, to think that I've figured out why. It's physics, it's metaphysics, and it's quantum physics. 

We start with Newton's basic laws of motion:

1. An object in motion tends to remain in motion, and an object at rest tends to remain at rest, unless acted upon by an outside force.
2. Force = an object's mass multiplied by its acceleration.
3. Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction.

From the work of Swiss polymath Leonhard Euler on how to measure force, we get the metaphysical idea of "impenetrability," which says that two objects cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Quantum physics pioneer Wolfgang Pauli confirmed this by determining that two identical fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. 

So here's my brain, with far too many thoughts trying to occupy the same space, constantly bombarded with new information to shock and horrify and grieve me. My thoughts cannot come to rest. I have too many of them, moving too fast, and it's impossible to retrieve old information stored in happier times. 

It's not my fault, dammit. It's science. SCIENCE!

The worst of it is that I cope with stress by filling all my idle time, and taking on more and more projects. That is inevitably self-defeating: the more I work, the less I sleep, the less productive I become, the more stressed I am, the more work I take on, until I finally wind up roaring at someone who has absolutely no idea where that dragon came from. 

The corona dreams don't help. 




 

How Diversity Saves Us

I don't know everything. 

This doesn't surprise you, I'm sure, but it surprises me. It surprises me daily. I didn't win "Jeopardy!", but I did win "Ben Stein's Money," so I have a certificate that confirms my identity as an Officially Smart Person. So imagine my frustration when I discover that in fact, I do not know everything . . . 

. . . and that some of what I think I know is wrong. 

Scary, right? Embarrassing. Downright infuriating, sometimes. 

The easiest way to defend myself from those uncomfortable feelings is simply not to listen to anyone else, and to decline any new information that reveals or confirms my ignorance. 

See how crazy that sounds? But I do it every day, even when I know I'm doing it. We all do it. Nobody wants to be afraid or embarrassed or thwarted. But here's something I didn't figure out until much too late in life: People like to be asked. 

No, people love to be asked. There really aren't any stupid questions, because when you ask a question, people get to show you what they know that you don't. As it turns out, that's a lot. 

When someone makes a nasty comment about "diversity hiring," what they're saying is that they already know everything they need to know, and people with experiences and backgrounds different from theirs have no knowledge they could benefit from. Do you want to work with people like that? I don't. I don't want to be a person like that. 

Too many people in professional settings see colleagues as rivals, and the more differences they have from their colleagues, the worse the rivalry is — because if those differences are recognized and rewarded, they feel their own knowledge and skills are undervalued. 

As a Facebook meme I saw this weekend pointed out, it doesn't work that way. It's not pie. (Mmm, pie.) Value added is value added for everyone. Everybody benefits from broadening the range of skills, knowledge, experience, and points of view. Young people know things that middle-aged people don't. (I still haven't figured out how to make my smart TV play Amazon Prime.) People of different races, genders, sexual identities, educational backgrounds, etc. all approach challenges from different angles, and that helps everyone. 

If you're reading this, these are all things you probably already know, but I do have a point, and it's to thank Mitt Romney for showing up on Black Lives Matter Plaza yesterday. Mitt Romney is a white, 73-year-old multimillionaire who's been married to the same woman almost as long as I've been alive, and whose political views diverge from mine on almost everything. But he too recognizes the reality of systemic racism and the urgent need to reform our policing structures. He'll have ideas for solutions that might not occur to a lot of his traditional political opponents, and he loves this country just as much as we do. We can have healthy disagreements that generate better answers for everyone, as long as we listen. 

Mitt Romney showed up to listen yesterday, and I applaud that. He seems to understand that there are things he doesn't know, and he has resources most of us don't. Progress happens when we can recognize each other as allies. 

The Trauma of Change

Change is always loss.

A therapist told me that back in the 1990s, and I argued with her. These were changes I wanted to make, changes I was trying to make, changes that would improve my own life and the lives of those around me. If I could make those changes, I said, everyone would be better off, including myself. 

Yes, she said. She wasn't talking about net benefits. She wasn't denying the real anticipated gains. What makes change hard, she said, is that in the moment, change is always loss. 

It has become one of the most valuable insights anyone's ever given me. 

It's so hard to say, "I was wrong." It's hard to form a new habit, and it's even harder to break an old one. Every Sunday I open my beloved Panda Planner to the pages for the week ahead, where I set my goals and priorities, and I say I will walk at least half an hour a day and I will practice my guitar every day. Every Sunday, those pages ask me to evaluate the week that's just ended, and I have to admit that I didn't walk every day — sometimes I didn't walk any day — and I didn't do my guitar lesson every day, either. Because setting aside the half hour for walking or the half hour of guitar would mean that much less time fooling around on social media, or playing the New York Times Spelling Bee, or solving one of my four daily crossword puzzles (NYT, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and now The Daily Beast has one too). I'd have to give some of those things up. 

And those are small things, those are dumb things. So how much harder is it to change big things? 

Years ago, a friend lost a significant amount of weight without surgery. He told me that one of the hardest things about it was the effect it had on his social life. He said he thought his bad eating and drinking habits had made his friends feel better about their own choices, to the extent of feeling that his presence gave them permission to indulge. Once he changed his eating habits, he felt less welcome, and it made him wonder why he'd ever been welcome at all. 

This is not an excuse for not making the changes we need to make. It's a plea for kindness as we make those changes, and as the people around us make changes. Don't be skeptical about people's sincere desire to change, please. Don't mock us, please. You can ask how we plan to make amends, because the amends are what make these changes meaningful — but please, don't assume that past transgressions mean those changes aren't valuable and real. Like the prodigal son's father, let's celebrate the changes, the return to what should be our common home. 

It's only tangentially relevant, but this is the song that's in my head this morning. I never even was that much of a Wilson Phillips fan. 


 

The Importance of Showing Up

What a week it's been. 

Words are my business, but my words are inadequate for what's happening, and I'm asking myself what right I have to speak — except to say that none of this rot at the heart of our country is acceptable to me AT ALL. I want to be part of creating a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that ALL people are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Wouldn't that be nice? Here's Langston Hughes:

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two -
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

1930, he wrote that. He was 28 years old. And what's changed since then? 

Well, some things. Some things. The Confederate Appomattox statue that used to be at Prince and Washington Streets in Alexandria is gone, spirited away in the night by the people who put it up in the first place. Governor Northam announced yesterday that the statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond is coming down. Those are both good changes, things that reduce the message that Only Some People are welcome here. 

It's not enough. It won't be enough until everyone feels welcome and everyone feels safe. So tomorrow and Sunday I'll be at some marches, carrying a sign and putting my white-lady privilege to work for people who need it. I hope that's the effect, anyway. 

Most of the good things in my life have come to me just because I've shown up and said yes. That's the principle that drives my social activism, and I don't want it to be shallow or performative or virtue-signaling. I want to be counted. I want to bear witness. I want to make it easier for other people to show up, to be counted, to bear witness. Because silence becomes complicity. Silence is the enemy.

Even if it's just a bunch of us who agree with each other showing up to congratulate ourselves on our virtue, it's important that the people who don't agree see how many of us there are. By showing up we strengthen and support each other, and we speak for the people who cannot speak for themselves anymore. People like Breonna Taylor, who should be celebrating her 27th birthday today. People like George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Freddie Gray. Eric Garner. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Sandra Bland. Amadou Diallo. So many more names. So many lost lives. Say their names. 


 

Renewing the Face of the Earth

Today is Pentecost Sunday, commemorating the day on which the Holy Spirit descended upon the confused and mourning followers of Jesus. It might be my favorite feast day, even more than Christmas or Easter. 

The story is in the second chapter of Acts: they were all together in one place, when a sound like violent wind swept through the building. Tongues of fire appeared among them and above them, and suddenly they could understand each other. They were all speaking their own languages, but because they were listening to each other — listening to each other with the power and in the presence of the Holy Spirit — they understood each other. 

The prayer to the Holy Spirit asks it to create us, so that through us the Holy Spirit can renew the face of the earth. We call the Holy Spirit "Paraclete," because that's how Jesus described it at the Last Supper. He said he would ask the Father to send us a παράκλητος, which depending on the translation might be an advocate, or a helper, or a comforter. The word literally means "called to one's side."

Faith, Paul told the Hebrews, is the assurance of what we hope for and the evidence of what we don't see. The Holy Spirit boosts our faith, pulls us along when all we see is devastation. You are better than this, the Holy Spirit says. You are not an accident. You have been created. You can make things better. 

Catholic tradition tells us that the Holy Spirit offers seven gifts: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. If ever we needed those things, it's today—but that is true every day. 

Welcome home

The protestors in the streets around the country are angry about a lot of things, with good reason. But first and foremost, they are homesick. 

If you know me at all, you've probably heard me say that homesickness is the universal human condition. Our lives begin with a violent separation from a place that is warm, dim but lit by a soft pink glow, quiet but filled with a soft and constant rhythm, where most of us get to float without hunger or thirst or anxiety for nine months. The world we're born into is loud and bright and cold. People are poking us and expecting things from the moment we emerge, and we have to ask to be fed. The outside world has its compensations, but we never quite forget that sense of home, of a place where we are always welcome and always cared for.

The worst thing one human being can say to another is "You don't belong here." But it's the first thing any group of people does, once we form. We do it for reasons that feel valid and justified. It conserves scarce resources, it reinforces bonds among the group, it makes it easier to protect ourselves. You might even say it's an evolutionary imperative. It's why we're walking the planet: because our ancestors belonged, or figured out a way to belong by forming new groups or insinuating themselves into existing ones. We're alive because we have either inherited that belonging, or learned how to join groups that protect us, or created those groups for ourselves. 

Police within a society are responsible for protecting that society from people who cause harm. It can be a dangerous job, and the people who do it share a bond that creates its own group, with its own sense of who belongs and who doesn't. That's a necessary and understandable coping mechanism, but it becomes destructive when the police decide they get to say who belongs and who doesn't.

In the United States of America in 2020, a lot of us were prospering before the virus hit. How many of us were focused on protecting our groups, instead of on making sure that other people felt they too had a place to belong? 

Videos are circulating of Atlanta Chief of Police Erika Shields and Dallas Chief of Police Renée Hall walking through crowds of protestors last night—talking to them, treating them like citizens, like people who were where they were supposed to be in their own hometowns. That is the only way we'll get back to any kind of peaceful coexistence: by seeing each other, by talking to each other, by recognizing that these cities and this country and this planet are home to all of us, and each of us belongs just as much as everybody else. 

This morning the man in the White House said tonight would be "MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE." He has spent the last four years telling a lot of this country that they don't belong and they aren't welcome. What does his country look like, then? Is he the President only of those people? Where are the rest of us supposed to go, if we're not welcome in his country? 

Those questions have no acceptable answers. We have to find a way to welcome each other home again. 

 

Love Now, Peace Later

Spotify threw me some Doobie Brothers this morning. It's in my playlists because I was a kid in the 1970s and I still love this song, but I also wonder whether they tweaked the algorithms today.

You, telling me the things
You're gonna do for me
I ain't blind and I don't like
What I think I see

I cannot stand to watch the video from Minneapolis, but I am not allowing myself to look away. If you're here to wring your hands about how sad it is for people to be burning down their own neighborhoods, you can click away right now. Because all that's happening in Minneapolis is that the physical world is manifesting what's been going on institutionally, economically, psychologically, and spiritually for too damn long, and now we're finally seeing it in a way we can no longer ignore.

How much work do we — do I — put in to ignoring the pain and injustice that surround us every day? How many of the people around us — around me — are invisible because they don't look like us or sound like us?

The stories I write almost all turn out to be about the power of invisible women in a world that disregards them. But I don't have any idea what it really means to be invisible, because if I ever wanted to, I — like most middle-aged white women — could transform myself into Karen, the Woman Who Wants to Talk to the Manager. (And I say that with all apologies to at least three—no, four— dear friends named Karen. Sorry!)

The Karen superpower exists for reasons that I could defend on another day, but it's always used to punch down, which is never, ever, ever okay. It's rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of this society's power dynamics, and that misunderstanding is no longer excusable.

The people on the streets of Minneapolis are demanding, What will it take for you to see us? Do we have to set things on fire? Apparently they do. Apparently, that is what it took. God help us all if we don't figure out a way to see each other.

You can donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which is bailing protestors out of jail, here. Support for that organization has been so strong that they suggest you donate to these other local organizations:

• Black Visions Collective
• Reclaim the Block
• Northstar Health Collective (medics)

You can buy a book from Moon Palace Books, which is right in the middle of the conflict zone, here.

The front page of the Minnesota Freedom Fund says, "Love Now, Peace Later." That's a prayer I can get behind.

Love now.

Peace later.

Short Attention Span Theater

I joined Twitter because a PR client wanted me to.

This was spring 2007, Twitter was barely a year old, and I did not see the point of it. It felt self-referential to the point of narcissism. It reaches only the people who have chosen to join, I said, and not that many people had chosen to join, so why spend the time?

Everyone in publishing is on Twitter, they said.

That turned out to be true. It's still true—which is the official reason I don't quit it—but over the past 13 years it's become essential to my work and social life in ways I could not have imagined, and am not always sure are healthy. 

For people who work from home, as I mostly did even before the lockdown, Twitter is an online break room. Since the lockdown, it's become even more important. Although I subscribe to at least half a dozen newspapers and magazines online, Twitter is my primary news feed. It's my main outlet for social interaction. It's my major source of new friends since I moved back to DC. I don't think I've gotten any new clients through Twitter, but I might have. 

The PR client who originally wanted me to join is no longer on Twitter personally at all, although someone runs an account for their brand. Too time-consuming, they said, and too much of a distraction. 

I can't argue with that. It's a massive distraction, and worse than ever now because the pandemic has destroyed my attention span.

That's an almost universal experience, right? We've all lost our attention spans, haven't we? (Please reassure me by saying yes.) A Twitter pal—yes, I get the irony—starts every day online with a box-breath meditation, and sometimes I try to follow his example, but I can't seem to allow myself to stop that long. If I stop long enough to breathe and focus, I am paralyzed by fear, I dissolve in tears, or both.

And I am the luckiest person I know in this situation. I have much less reason to be fearful or sad than the vast majority of other people living through this. And I could be doing more to help those people. 

I need to be back around people because I'm afraid I don't know how to be around people anymore. I need to be away from screens from some sustained period of time, and I need to just listen to somebody else talk for a while without interruption or distraction. These aren't things that come naturally, I suspect. They're learned skills, and I'm forgetting how to do those things.  

The District of Columbia and northern Virginia are reopening tomorrow. I am not even sure what that means, except that next week I'll go back to my office, even if I have to walk.

Anyway, the original point of this post was that the President is probably not the only person who needs to step away from Twitter—but I seem to have made my point about short attention spans and the challenge of holding a sustained thought these days. Show, don't tell, the writing books say . . .

Dreams in the Time of Corona

I had this dream that I relished
The fray
And the screaming filled my head all day
("Nautical Disaster," The Tragically Hip) 

We're all having crazy dreams, right? I don't usually remember mine, but I've started sleeping in four-hour stretches. If I rouse myself when I wake up at the end of those four hours—if I turn on a light, or check my phone, or try to read—I regret it, because I can rarely get back to sleep after that. But if I keep the lights off and my eyes closed, and count backwards or say prayers or recite song lyrics in my head, I usually do fall back asleep, and that's when the dreams come. 

The dreams these days fall into three categories: 

• Dreams in which I am lost, even in familiar settings, where hallways do not lead to expected destinations or roads peter out
• Dreams in which I am unprepared, such as realizing that my high school senior speech is the next day and I haven't even chosen a topic
• Dreams in which I cannot fix whatever's broken, whether it's a car that won't start or a window that shatters or a washing machine that overflows

Nothing here requires much insight. Who could have prepared for this? Even the doomsday preppers seem unequipped. We have no realistic models to project outcomes. We lack the information we need to make good decisions.

This morning I decided to have an English muffin and an orange for breakfast. I am already second-guessing the lack of protein. I should have put peanut butter on the English muffin. Maybe I'll have eggs for lunch. That's the level of planning I feel capable of right now. 

Yesterday I covered a "virtual roundtable" in the House of Representatives—their rules don't allow hearings that don't take place in person—during which a panelist (not witness, because this wasn't a hearing) said that the stock market is a leading indicator of the economy, showing how investors expect the economy to perform about six months from now. 

My eyes rolled so hard I might have injured my optic nerve. If this were ever true—and I'm not at all sure it was—this is nothing but wishful thinking right now. Right now our stock market is nothing more than a virtual game of Pit. It's about the transactions, and I find it increasingly hard to believe it's tied to any underlying intrinsic value. 

Of course, this might be why I'm not rich. 

Pandemic Time

When I pulled the milk jug out of the refrigerator this morning, the date caught my eye: 

SELL BY
MAY 21

What day is it? I had to check my phone. It's May 26, which you may or may not already have known. 

Reader, I put that milk in my coffee anyway. And it's fine, or at least it doesn't taste terrible, and I'm not dead yet. 

But it's one more symptom of the bizarre time dilation of the Great Lockdown. 

March, everyone agreed, lasted forever. We didn't know what was happening, day to day, and everything hung in a strange suspension that made things scheduled a week away feel as if they might as well be the next year. 

But since everything shut down, I don't know where the time has gone. I would be hard-pressed to tell you one specific thing that happened in April, although my daughter's birthday was the 10th and Easter happened somewhere in there. I think April was when my dad got off the Zaandam—and yes, I just checked, he got home on April 3. I know I baked a cake for my mom's birthday (May 1) even though she hasn't been around to celebrate for a long time. Yesterday was Memorial Day, the earliest possible day that Memorial Day can be. And next week is June already.

A friend of mine has been knocking a year off her age for as long as I've known her. She took care of her father as he died of cancer, and she considers that a lost year that shouldn't count against her age. That feels reasonable, especially now. Will we all be allowed to cut three months, six months, a year off our age for the Year of COVID-19? 

Age is not something I think much about. I started out younger than everybody, and it surprises me to find I'm often the oldest in the (virtual) room these days. But if it's just a number, I feel entitled to stay 54 for another six months, at least. 

At the recommendation of the great and gifted Laura Benedict, I started using a Panda Planner to organize my life last year (last year? 2018? I have no idea). It's been transformational, but these days it feels performative instead of constructive. Every day it asks me to list three things I'm grateful for, which vary day to day (today: sunshine, grilled cheese, Spotify podcasts) and three things I'm looking forward to, which gets increasingly baffling. Saying I look forward to the things I do look forward to—cookouts with my family, afternoon hangouts in bars with my friends, NATIONALS BASEBALL—without knowing when any of those things might happen again just makes me sad. Which is contrary to the point of the Panda Planner. 

It's hang time, I tell myself. Just hang time. Which makes me think of the beautiful song about this by Fountains of Wayne and the late Adam Schlesinger, another victim of this stupid virus. So I'll leave you with that today, and try to feel the wealth of having all kinds of time.

Meditations in an Emergency

Well into the third month of the COVID-19 lockdown feels like a good time to revive this blog. I'd change the name, but I'm going to leave it as both accusation and reminder: I don't have all the answers, and the answers I have aren't especially useful. I bought a wall hanging from the brilliant Brian Andreas to reinforce the point: 

I won't buy a frame for it until the lockdown ends, but it's propped up on my nightstand so I can see it every day. 

A strange momentum carried me and many others through the first few weeks of lockdown, and I know this was especially true for my relatives and friends who have kids at home. So many logistical details to deal with, so many things to cancel and rearrange and shore up. Lists to make, priorities to identify. Ten weeks in, I'm floating in a windless ocean with no map and no means of propulsion. I could be out here indefinitely. 

Paradoxically, my work is busier than it's been in years. I'm deeply grateful for that, and I'm sharing as much of that prosperity as I can. Anything I would ordinarily have spent on Metro or Lyft, at baseball games and concerts, on road trips, is going to food banks and women's shelters and clinics and out-of-work performers. It's not enough.

That's what I'm struggling with this morning: it's not enough. Today is a work day for me, because it has to be. I have at least three emails in my inbox that are asking me for things I don't feel capable of today, and I haven't opened them because I'm afraid of what that feels like. Some of it's justified, some of it's not, some of these requests are unreasonable and not things that should be coming my way. The internal monologue runs: 

            Why am I feeling so afraid?  

            Afraid of what?

            Afraid of not being enough.

            Enough for whom?

            Afraid of being judged and found wanting.

            By whom?

            Afraid of being held in contempt.

            Again, by whom?

            By [professional colleague's name redacted].

            Fuck that guy.

Is "fuck that guy" kind? Is it helpful? Is it necessary? No, no, and yes. 

So the day begins.

Are you figuring out how to be enough? What are you doing about it? And how are things with you?

On Godwin's Law

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

—Mike Godwin 

Years ago my friend Eileen and I visited the Dachau memorial in Munich. The first surprise was how we got there: we took the S-Bahn to the Dachau stop, then an ordinary city bus that ran through a pleasant residential suburb — streets of houses that run almost right up to the gate of the camp. I'd imagined Dachau, or any concentration camp, out in some remote area far from human habitation, where atrocities could happen out of people's sight and minds. Dachau's not like that at all. It's situated more like the Naval Academy in Annapolis, a large institution in full view at one edge of town. 

It's hard to imagine how a town could go about its business with 30,000 being starved and worked to death in their backyard. But of course it didn't start that way. It started with the announcement of a camp for political prisoners, mostly Germans, numbering 5,000 at most. Adolf Hitler had just taken office, and Heinrich Himmler, who was Munich's Chief of Police as well as Reichsführer of the SS, was a man known for his organizational skills. Dachau was the first concentration camp he set up, and it became, as he intended, a model for all the others. It was orderly. It was discreet. It offered employment to hundreds, even thousands of men who had been too long unemployed in Weimar Germany. 

This week Kris Kobach, the former Kansas Secretary of State who is openly campaigning for the yet-to-be-created position of "immigration czar" in the Trump administration, told Lou Dobbs that the US should "create processing towns that are confined" for refugees at the border — "We process them right there, in that camp," he said. 

The United States is a vast country. The neighborhood I live in — Pentagon City, Arlington County, Virginia — is one of the wealthiest in the country, and about to get a lot wealthier as it becomes the site of one of Amazon's new headquarters. The Texas-Mexico border is approximately 1,500 miles away. 

It's upsetting and unpleasant to watch the images on the news, to read about the families being separated and the children being taken from their parents — practices, I should say, that did not start with this administration, but have certainly gotten worse. It's alarming to hear the President of the United States say on camera, "These aren’t people, these are animals." 

Godwin's Law, cited above, evolved as a tongue-in-cheek observation about how quickly people compare things they don't like to the worst human crimes imaginable. The danger of these comparisons is that when it is time to compare something to the Nazis, the comparison has lost its power. 

But I think about Dachau. I think about how happy people were to have jobs. I think about how it all seemed benign, even worthwhile, in 1933. I think about the 30,000 prisoners liberated in April 1945, and how thousands of them died anyway, after liberation, because it was too late to save them from starvation, typhus, and everything else they'd been put through. 

Twelve years passed between Dachau's opening and its liberation. You can get used to a lot over the course of twelve years. 

I do not want to get used to any of this, but I don't know what to do. I'm running a voter registration table in my building later this month. I just sent another $50 to Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley. 

And I think it's time to start talking about Hitler. To hell with Godwin's Law.

Enough

I saw the reports of the Christchurch massacre just before I went to bed last night. I haven't been able to read the full coverage of it yet. I want to read the names of the people who died, I want to learn more about their stories, but I haven't been able to bring myself to look because I don't want to know a damn thing about their killer.

Or maybe I do, because the question no one ever asks or answers is, "What would be enough for you?" Asking what they want is missing the point. The answers to that question are always some kind of performance that boils down to MORE. More space (remember Lebensraum?), more privilege, more respect, more money, more love, more more more more more more more. Presumably they think whoever they're killing is taking that away from them, or keeping them away from it. They never go after the people who actually have more power or money or freedom than they do. (That wouldn't be okay, either, but at least it would be understandable.)

No, the question is, "What is enough?" If you feel you have enough, you don't have to pay attention to what anyone else is getting. You don't have to try to take anything away from the people around you.

What would be enough to make these men feel whole? And what would be enough to stop them?