Category: politics

Who Gets to be Happy?

As I was sitting at the award ceremony for our second grader yesterday, I felt something not new, but clarified. The grinning, gap-toothed kiddos were walking across the stage, and parents were clapping as usual. I don’t know about other parents, but typically at these events, applauding 70 times gets a little tedious. You loose momentum.

Not this time.

Every single face was a miracle. Every single grin was a treasure. It was my profound joy to celebrate not just their As and Bs but their existence. I would smack my hands together for eternity if it would keep them goofy and giggling and grinning until they are old, grey, and their lives have been full of joy.

I still have one blog left in my March to May series, but I’m still not ready to post it. Because it’s still not time. It’s about a shade of grief, a shadowy contour of a happy life. It’s about my struggle to understand the co-existence of grief and contentment, of loss and love, of blistering happiness and bruised spots.

Before I zoom into the more minor contours of that ambivalence, there’s some other things that need to be said. The horror in Uvalde put certain things into light, and, as most things, they are not unrelated.

Living in a country where this kind of tragedy is not a fluke, but actually relatively common (compared to, oh, the rest of the world) has made it impossible to go to a school ceremony, a movie, church, the grocery store, concerts, restaurants, or anywhere with other people —a key component of most celebrations—and not have a tinge of worry or preoccupation about our safety. Physical safety is too fundamental a need to brush aside. It’s absence, or the ever-present threat of its absence, can’t co-exist with the kind of single-minded happiness I often long for.

When I become aware of loss, fragility, or threats to things I love, I experience anxiety. The joy goes away.

So I have to confront the question: Can I ever be purely happy in this country? Can you? Can anyone?

I had two conversations that helped me answer that question. First with my husband, and then with a friend, a first generation immigrant whose life has been dedicated, along with his parents, to needs along the Texas border with Mexico.

My husband and I were simply feeling sad and frustrated that we are raising kids under constant existential anxiety. Climate change. Guns. All that. At the same time, my husband pointed out, our babies don’t die from colds and pox. We don’t have to be afraid of Viking raiders showing up out of nowhere. We’re safer at home than we’ve ever been, with one exception: the two generations preceding us.

Of course, that got me thinking about the trajectory of culture of the 20th century, the peaks of innovation, domination and excess. Space races, arms races, wars on drugs, wars on communist countries, culture wars. Every “industrial complex” ballooning. We didn’t limit our innovation to ways to improve humanity. Limits are intolerable to us. We instead doubled down on man’s desire to enrich himself, and celebrated when something good, like super glue or malaria vaccines, happened along the way. We accepted the crumbs of advancement made possible by the feast of greed and domination.

I thought about how much I hate waiting. How much I hate to hear “no.” And it’s not just an internet generation thing. The pursuit of a wide open view, a “good” school, deregulation. Our generation didn’t make that up. We inherited that. We have been, in so many ways, baptized into it by a spiritual tradition that has encouraged it. That has taken the beatitudes and God’s heart for the poor and turned them into ways to reinforce the authority of those at the top. Churches that ignore the connection between our social and spiritual hollowness.

Our churches do not, despite Jesus’s example, acquaint us with suffering or grief. Not our own, not others. Especially not the grief created by our desire to hear only “more.” So we push grief to the margins. We insulate, or flee to suburbs. We blame the poverty we created for the ills we run from. When singular tragedies—car accidents, cancer, etc—come along, those who grieve become different from “us” the happy unbothered. We hope they’ll join us again.

But they are not so singular anymore, these grieving ones. The quest for unencumbered happiness and zero suffering has brought anxiety and grief to the masses, including the ones who would do anything to avoid it. A generation of mostly-white middle class capitalists—who grew up carefully removed from systemic suffering, who were told not to let personal grief ruin anyone else’s day—is consumed with anxiety. Domination has come home to roost, and we do not have the tools to confront it.

Which leads me to the second conversation I had yesterday before I the second grade award ceremony.

I was talking to my friend, and I shared some of these observations about how I don’t know how to find joy when I’m this anxious, when suffering is always swirling around in the mix. I take my joy neat, and if it’s not neat, I try to bend the world to make it so.

But that’s not the world my friend grew up in. His parents, immigrants from Mexico, deliberately sought out those who were hurting, and lived remarkably inconvenienced lives, even after his father died as result, literally giving his life in pursuit of those on the margins (there’s a Christianity Today story forthcoming on this). My friend and his siblings all went to college. Some have masters degrees. But they are choosing to follow their parents example. They are serving, choosing to live their lives in view of suffering, and amazingly, they are celebrating plenty in the middle of it. Graduations. Baby showers. Dinners together.

They resisted the lures of the insulated, excessive pursuit of happiness…but they have joy anyway.

His parents were and are exceptionally generous and near to the brokenhearted, but my friend and I are not unique, we noted. We are part of our racial and economic and spiritual systems.

People of color have been bearing the cost of domination and empire for millennia. Poor people have been the grist for the mills of progress. And yet, collectively and privately, they have found joy—and even frame it as a way to resist those who want them to suffer. They love their children and delight in them. They dance at weddings and sing at birthdays. Even though their happiness never has a blank check or absolute security. Even though the world has never bent to their desires.

My friend and his family prove that it is possible to both grieve and delight, to thrive without dominating.

Anyone can taste the poisoned fruit of domination—power imbalance is not unique to racism and colonialism. But the more you have access to it, the more you eat it, the tougher we fear it will be to live without it, and that’s where I think me and my race/class peers are stuck in this bed we made. But giving it up is the only way out. It’s the only way to stop hurting our neighbors, and the only way I can think of to ease this anxiety we all have to live with now. I also think, coincidentally, it is the Way, like the one Jesus talked about.

If there is a way forward, out of this miasma, for me and my folks, we have to change, to step out of a quest for domination and into solidarity. If we want fewer guns, we will have to acknowledge the rights we don’t have. If we want a stable climate with enough food, we have to accept limits on our consumption. We have to look at the way we police, the way we invest, the way we educate. To relieve the grief of many, we have to suffer our share. For all to feast, we have to stop stuffing our faces.

I am convinced that for people with power to be willing to do that, to embrace limits and suffering and solidarity, they have to re-learn what it means to have joy and what it means to sit with grief. We need a joy that can exist within limits. We need to acknowledge that the cost of avoiding grief can be too high.

The ability to hold both joy and grief, one unstolen the other unexiled, is resistance. It fuels the sober hopefulness we have to carry if we are going to change these systems, if we are going to build something new. It lets us see limits and suffering and sacrifice as part of wholeness, for ourselves and others.

As I talked to my friend, we discussed the need for spiritual leadership by the people who know how to commune with suffering. People who have suffered themselves, who carry a grief that they do not feel entitled to avenge. We need to bring the suffering to the center and dwell with it, to share the suffering and then to share the feast.

Twig Book Challenge Wrap-Up and a New Adventure

Well, I did it. I forgot to post about it, but I did complete the book challenge.

My last two categories were “A book over 500 pages” and “A book over 100 years old.”

I used these categories as an opportunity to transition into my new adventure: starting this year, I am now a full time writer. Not the novel-writing kind of writer, but the “multiple commercial, journalistic, and creative projects at once” kind.

Quitting my steady paycheck to pursue a lifelong dream would have been a very bold Millennial generation kind of thing to do, if my job hadn’t been a dream job. I was paid to travel. Comfortably. More than comfortably. Luxuriously.

But, I have a calling. It’s become fairly clear. And that calling is to write.

Because Lewis and I are both firm believer that funding is an essential part of creative endeavors, I’m freelancing for my supper. In addition to bringing in pretty decent money, commercial projects give me daily writing exercise.

I’ve also taken on a more official role at The Rivard Report. Business cards and all. As their education writer, I’ll be sitting in on a lot of board meetings, yes, but also exploring what might be one of the great social justice issues of our generation: educational outcomes. So, in addition to stimulating conversation, it helps me sleep at night knowing that if the world ends before I publish a book, I haven’t wasted my time.

Which brings me to the big creative project that pushed me over the edge into full-time writerhood.

First stop on the Olmsted Trail: Library of Congress.
                                              First stop on the Olmsted Trail: Library of Congress.

For the next four months I’ll be following the trail of Frederick Law Olmsted’s journey across Texas, documenting the changing fates of the places he visited. Conveniently, his home base was San Antonio. So it will be a series of smaller journeys following his timeline, rather than one epic road trip.

(You can follow the trip on select social media sites: #olmstedintexas, and expect regular blog posts starting…soon)

Which brings me back to the beginning of this post. In preparation I read the following books, among many others, as a point of transition:

  1. Over 500 pages: Rough Country: How Texas Became the Most Powerful Bible Belt State, by Robert Wuthnow- basically, if you want to understand why your friends from other states assume you like Ted Cruz, but don’t assume you like Julian Castro…this is the history for you. Why people assume more of Texas looks like Dallas (fundamentalist Bible belt and big business) than like San Antonio (Catholic Southwest and not-as-big-business).  Technically, the prose in the book ended at 480 pages. But they were dense pages and I read a lot of the reference material and footnotes, so I’m giving myself this one.
  2. Written over 100 years ago: Journey to Texas 1833 , by Detlef Dunt – Olmsted actually refers to this widely publicized account of a German immigrant to Texas while it was under Mexican rule. He basically says, “Who was paying this guy?” The author (Dunt is probably a pen name) gives a pretty encouraging account of what he found on arrival in Texas, which upon reading Olmsted and Wuthnow, I’m tempted to agree was something of an advertisement for others to follow his lead and come to Texas, which was then a very rough country.

 

Twig Book Challenge: Third Quarter

This year our local bookshop is conducting a reading challenge. Now that Moira goes to bed at 7:30pm, I thought, well, why not! Reading is quiet, portable, and doesn’t require me to get into a “mode” the way that writing does. As January revealed, I like a structured challenge, and I have been enjoying the Twig’s reading challenge since January 2. I’ll be reporting on my progress periodically. This quarter’s reads have reviews in this post, previous quarters’ reviews are on the previous Twig posts.

AND I still need a 500 word page turner to close her out! (if you’ve already recommended, please remind me, as social media tends to bury these things) …

Another blogger writes about racism and where it begins

So every blogger on in America is telling us how to respond to the shootings in Charleston. Everyone is trying to say the one profound thing that’s going to send an arrow straight to the heart of racism and explode it.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Because, like many have said, we need to talk about it. We, the white folks (who seem to all have blogs), need to talk about it. We also need to listen to our black, brown, and everything else friends. To fall back on my grad school vocabulary: it’s time for everyone to interrogate whiteness.

So this blog post does not contain the one nugget that’s going to change racism. …

Friday Night Rant: Social Media is not killing us

Sometimes there are socially vogue rants that make me want to move to Siberia. Hating on social media is one of them.

I’m just as annoyed as the next guy by the constant dinging of my phone (so I turned off my push notifications), the 19 Facebook notifications that have nothing to do with me, and the rivers of unfiltered troll vomit on Nextdoor.

HOWEVER, I find it more tiresome when people whine about social media, and talk about how stupid it is. How over it they are. Everytime I hear that I think, “it’s okay, old man, we know you’re overwhelmed by what the kids are up to these days.” Or “yes, I know, little girl, you’re cooler than God.”

Use it, don’t use it. I don’t really care. But if you use it, own it.

Part of owning social media is understanding how it works. So lets break it down: …

Golden Birthday Challenge: Day 1

This year is my golden birthday. I’ll be 31 on January 31. My friend Cacc challenged me to make something of it by doing something new (to me) every day of January. So I will have done 31 new things by the time I turn 31 on the 31st.

Being that I have a 9 month old and every day is totally unpredictable, I’m staying away from weighty things, and I may have to blog a few at a time. If I make it to the 31st blogging every day then I’m buying myself a pony. I swear. That’s how certain I am that it’s not going to happen. But I’ll try, because who doesn’t want a pony on their 31st birthday.

So, here goes.

New thing for Jan 1: Watch a swearing in ceremony for a local judge…who happens to be related to me.

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I am very proud of Tommy Stolhandske. He’s the most fair person I know, which is a pretty great quality in a judge. He’s had a huge year, adding a daughter, who herself is a force of determination, and winning his seat on the bench shortly thereafter.

Voting for a Republican is a big deal in our house…but we could do so with no reservations, knowing that he brings a commitment to the law and its practical, wise dispensation.

The swearing-in was a family affair, with the generations of Stolhandske politicians, attorneys, and campaigners all playing a role. It’s always an adventure to go to the courthouse, and this time, there was cake and gifted gavels.

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Moira Brings the News: Veterans Affairs

Anyone who watches Jon Stewart knows that the Veterans Affairs department is deeply mired in a beurocratic malaise that is only getting deeper.

Now they’ve fired Eric Shinseki, but analysts and law makers seem to agree that the long wait times covered up by lying and cheating is likely to continue. Our veterans are no closer to getting the kind of timely and thorough health care they deserve.

For astute analysis of this complex issue, we turn to Moira Sage, who brings a fresh set of eyes to the matter.

Moira, tell us what legislation and policy you would put in place to ensure that our veterans are taken care of when they return from defending our country overseas?

Veterans affairs

Moira Brings the News: Secretary Castro

San Antonio’s Mayor Julián Castro is moving on up. We’re sad to see him go, as he has been a voice for progress in the city, ushering in the decade of downtown, SA202o, and other forward-thinking initiatives like Pre-K4SA.

Castro has been tapped for a position on President Obama’s cabinet as Housing and Urban Development Secretary. We’ll know he’ll do a fantastic job, and we hope to see him on another ballot someday so that we can, again cast our vote for him.

In the meantime, over to our junior correspondent, Moira Sage, who has some thoughts for the Mayor, as he joins Obama’s cabinet:

Moira - May 4 100