I really appreciate stuff like this.

I imagine the meeting in which they discuss the design of the container, and some kind soul was like, "You know what would be so helpful?"

I wonder if it costs them more to print.  Or maybe it's a marketing ploy to lure in saps like me.  

It's not a homeless problem.

It's a greed problem.

What are we going to do about all these homeless people?

What are we going to do all about all of these wealthy people who don't recognize and rail against the absurdity of walking by someone laying on the sidewalk?

Radical motherhood.

When Dad was here last Sunday, he and I went with Anne to see Spotlight, the movie about The Boston Globe’s investigative reporting on rampant sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests – and the deliberate cover-up by powerful Catholic officials.

In that cloud of context, we drove home, and Anne ran some ideas by me for the prayer she was writing for that week’s coming Bible study.  Harry had invited Jeralynn Brown Blueford, whose son was killed by the police, to speak with us as we looked at the Biblical connections to Black Lives Matter.  (Ultimately, I wasn’t able to be there.  Ricky said it drew in a lot of people.  We’re looking for some place to resonate our griefs off of one another, I suppose.  And this badass mother – who could stand up and lead in that group.  Dang…)

Having lost a son herself, Anne wondered how she could both express solidarity with the mothers of so many sons murdered by the police but in no way claim to “understand what that feels like.”

Dad said (and Anne didn’t hear, so we didn't go on about it) that he could really see the connection there to Mary, another mother who lost a son.  

Such a good point, Dad.

Mary’s son was also executed within an unjust criminal justice system. The Sadducees, Jewish leaders themselves, often get blamed for Jesus’ death, but it seems to me to be more like men (ahem) scrambling for some semblance of power under the crushing weight of the self-evidently more (much more) powerful and oppressive Roman Empire.

(Police today are for sure a horrific part of the problem [and I’m afraid that this analogy might be anti-Semitic because of my pronounced ignorance about Jewish history], but White Supremacy has been the name of the game for a lot longer than the NYPD, and etc.  [As the Roman claim for dominion was certainly not Jewish-only antagonism.] Our country came to be under conditions not possible if not for those White guys’ already undeniable commitment to White supremacy.  It’s how we do.)

AND Mary was no naïve, whimpering victim.  No no.  Mary was our comrade.  Even at the very beginning of her pregnancy with Jesus, she boldly claimed that our God is a God who cares for the poor, the downtrodden.  She sings out: Our God is not a God who feels the need to assert that “Blue lives matter!”  Duh, they matter, but God’s immediate concern is not for those with the power to execute at will with impunity.  (God seeks and waits for them, gives unearned grace, and will rejoice at their turn toward God, but) God calls us to make the oppressors see that the lives of the oppressed matter (, too.).

And Mary said:  

“My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
holy is his name.
His mercy extends to those who fear him,
from generation to generation.
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
to Abraham and his descendants forever,
just as he promised our ancestors.”

I got an email from a dear friend recently who made a self-deprecating joke about her plan to be “a stay-at-home mom” next year.  Nuh-uh.

I like the model of motherhood that Mary offers us.  Mother as freedom fighter.  Motherhood as a liberation movement.  A couple days later I saw this piece on the shackling of pregnant women in prison – a piece published by MomsRising (!).

I’ve thought a lot about how God created us to be in family to help us to understand better, to give us some framework, for understanding God’s relationship with us.  God mothers us all.  (And God values the work associated with motherhood.  We're the ones who think it feminine and thus base or undignified or disempowering.)

Thinking about motherhood this way brought me back to one of the most compelling for me scenes in the passion.  Here’s John’s:

When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” 

Comrades, here you are. 

My child, here is my child.   Go out, as you are called to do, and help to restore God’s order, God’s (social) justice.

Black lives matter to God.

God cares about all of us as, for example, we care about one another in our family relationships. 

God worries about the way that we’ve designed “race” as a powerful construct by which we move away from God’s justice, by which we forget or ignore that God calls us all God’s children.  All lives matter.

God worries especially about those of God’s children who are poor, who are murdered, who are silenced.

And God calls those of us who are squandering, who are murdering, who are silencing, to remember that God worries about us, too.  God will rejoice when we give up our shit, nurture our create-ivity, and sing together.  Yeah duh all lives matter. Seriously duuuhhhhhhh.

God mothers us all.  God watches Black people getting gunned-down again and again (and again and again).

AND, WITH SCREAMING URGENCY:

Black lives matter to God.

Just like in Toy Story.

My printer has low toner, and every time I ask it to print something, it tells me so in its little screen's 1990s font.

The exclamation point comes up over the printer icon on the dock on the bottom of my desktop.

Clicking the printer icon opens a little window at the corner that tells me that the laptop is "Searching for the printer."

After about five minutes, it prints.

The five-minute wait is hilarious to me.  It's like the printer is saying, "No seriously, my toner is low.  You need to change the toner."  And I'm like, "I mean, I will soon, but it costs $50, and I know you can still print things."  It waits as if to tell me, "Nope."  But I tell it that I know that whatever it's printed last still came out black, not gray, so there's definitely enough toner for it to print out this letter of recommendation for E.  So I'm like, "I know you're bluffing"  And the printer's like, "No I'm not."  And it tries to wait me out, arms crossed over its chest, face frozen in a "I told you so" expression.

And then it's like, so begrudgingly, "Fiiiiiiiiiiiiine," and I can tell it's still mad, but I don't really care because I won. 

An official said to one of my incarcerated colleagues at a hearing about his suitability for parole:

"You need to focus less on helping other people and more on helping yourself."

strange dream

I dreamt last night that J at the prison gave me a book that was a compilation of fourteen narratives of crimes committed by men from this particular prison, past and present.

I sat down and read the whole thing that afternoon, and just a few minutes after I'd closed it up, I got a phone call from someone saying his name was Kelle [pronounced Kelly] Jackson and that he had served ten to fifteen years at this particular prison.  He said that when he'd been there, conditions had been horrible and that he'd heard that it had since become an easy place to do time.  He wondered if the state was going to give him some money to compensate for the time he had to do at this prison before it got better.

As I listened, my heart and mind raced because his name was really familiar.  I flipped the book open to the table of contents, dragged my finger down the whole first page, flipped to the second, and there was his name at the top: John "Kelle" Jackson.  (Later in the dream, I kept confusing Jackson with Johnson when I was telling the story to a few different people -- J and M from the prison, a few people who were at the party going on in the backyard of the house I grew up in while I sat reading in the front room [pronounced frunchroom].  I had to keep correcting myself.)

I said to Kelle Jackson, into the receiver of the non-cordless house phone, "Are you kidding me?  The violent crimes you committed, and you think you deserve compensation from the state?"  He corrected me.  He hadn't committed crimes plural, just one crime.  Later in the dream when I told the story to J and M, they confirmed what he's said, reminding me of the key points of the Kelle Johnson chapter I'd read earlier that day.

these obscene questions

Here's the thing.  Here's what it comes down to:

A White man does not get to call "obscene" an account, authored by a Black woman, of the emotional fallout of the ubiquity of sexual violence against girls and women.

A White man does not get to call a Black woman's hurt "obscene."

It's obscene for a man to censor women's unceasing trauma because that trauma is "obscene."  That trauma is perpetrated and perpetuated by men empowered by the very White supremacist patriarchy that also empowers this particular censoring White man.

did you hurt a woman today
i have to ask these obscene questions
the authorities require me to
establishimmediate cause
every three minutes
every five minute
severy ten minutes
every day.
-- Ntzoke Shange, from "with no immediate cause" 

blindspots

The other day, I was inside working with my incarcerated colleagues to set up our classroom, organize, finalize, etc.

I was making a sign for our wall, and I got up to walk over to the supply closet, absent-mindedly saying to myself, "Scissors.. scissors.. scissors."

One of the guys laughed at me, "Ellen, we ain't go no scissors."

Another jumped on, "Yeah, somebody pass me the knife!"

More totally justified laughing at my expense.

the cruelty of the vague no

While most likely obvious to many many people, in my recent learnings about setting up boundaries, I've come to an epiphany:

If the answer is "no," just say so.  Hedging the no-ness of the answer theoretically makes it "nicer," but really it just extends my anxiety and extends the waiting and/or confusion and/or humiliation of the receiver of the "no."

---

Exhibit A:
There was this woman who started working at the bridal shop months ago now.  After a few weeks, the folks in charge determined that she wasn't going to be a good fit.  No one was assigned responsibility for firing her, though, so no one let her know that she was fired.  She kept calling to ask when she was supposed to come in, and we kept telling her that she needed to talk to this person, to that person, to this other person, to that other person.  Finally, she was told, "There's not going to be a full-time job here for you," which was even then a vague firing since there was still the specter of a part-time job, a specter everyone knew wouldn't come alive since she had been clear from the beginning that she needed full-time work.

How shitty of us -- and I'm very much rolled in to that "us."  It must have been so maddening to not really know whether or not she should/could look for or accept another job.  And I imagine I'd be like, "Listen, I don't give a fuck either way.  Just tell me so I know."

We were too cowardly to fire her, so we let her wait around by the phone for weeks.  Shitty.

Exhibit B:
I know this dude who I find fairly attractive and cool and could be interested in dating.  And whenever we spent time together, I got the sense that he was interested, too, since he was real touchy-feely all the time.  Finally (after a few beers), I got the courage to ask him what was going on between us, and his eyes got wide while he nodded his head back and forth, "Umm... I don't know what you're talking about."

I call bullshit.

A few days later, we talked, and I told him that if he wasn't interested, he needed to stop touching me because it was very confusing and even kinda hurtful.  He went into a long-winded explanation of his interest/non-interest with lots of tangents and illustrations.  I left so confused, and a little humiliated, but mostly proud of myself for voicing my "what the fuck" and setting a clear boundary in the midst of his hazy talk talk talk.

---

In the first example, I was participating in the "I feel bad firing her" thing that kinda made me feel better than I thought being direct would have, but actually just made it so that my anxiety flared up a few times a week whenever she called.

In the second example, though it took me a while to realize, he wanted to be nice and not say outright that he's not interested, but really it just made me feel kinda skeezy.  In the end, it really wasn't that serious to me whether or not he was interested, and it was kind of embarrassing for him to so obviously tread so softly on my poor little feelings.

---

My mom told me this new thing she's doing wherein when someone asks her to do something or if she wants to go somewhere, and she doesn't, she just sorta tilts her head to the side and says, "Uh, no that doesn't work for me."  And that's it.  No explanation.  Just nope.

When someone says "nope" to me -- in all kinds of contexts -- it doesn't usually hurt.  Mostly it feels like, "K. Got it."  And then I don't really think about it again.  Because whatever.

That's the way to do it.

7 x 70

I was struck particularly, yesterday as I rode the bus to work, by the difficulty of finding something new to say about "Martin's dream and look at us now... no better," etc.  And yet it's worth saying every year.  Worth it, but it feels fucking futile.

Reports of police murders of unarmed People of Color keep coming and keep being infuriating.  And we should keep marching.

Mass shootings keep on happening.  And every time we say, "What's it going to take?," and "Something has to be done," and we keep pointing out, and we should, how coverage of White shooters leans toward mental illness and coverage of violence committed by People of Color condemns "terrorists" and "thugs."  I'd love to hear someone on the news call for moderate White people to speak out against White supremacist extremists; but we always hear how moderate Muslims need to take a stand.  And we should keep being pissed and saying so.

Though it usually doesn't get much new coverage, men perpetrate violence against women at outrageous rates.  And actually, not often enough do we make a big ol' deal about that -- which is why this interview about the rape of a woman by a bunch of teens in a playground is so gratifying.

CNN newscaster: She was drunk, combative, and bit a police officer.  What would you say about that? 

Badass: I would say that that's typical.  That individuals often talk about the woman.  We rarely talk about the individuals who actually committed the rape.  Those are the individuals we should be focused on right now... We need to focus on those five individuals who committed this heinous crime.  And what were the bad decisions that they made all throughout the day?  Had they been drinking?  Had they been smoking?  What would put something in someone's mind to make them think that that was okay?

So mundane and so exhausting and then so fucked up for being mundane and exhausting.

(And I want to be really clear that as a White person, I by no means claim the kind of exhaustion that I might be party to had I not this White body that keeps me safe from the same kinds of danger that I'm railing against.  I'm in no danger of being gunned down by a police officer who thinks I'm dangerous just by the look of me.  What a privilege.)

I sat on the bus wondering what was the point of it all, and I was struck with remembering the time when one of the apostles is sick and tired of being sick and tired and asks Jesus, "How many times am I supposed to forgive these fools? Seven times?"  And Jesus says, "Seven times seventy times."  -- Which I have to believe is a Biblical way of saying what I might call "a thousand billion trillion million times." Because it seems like he's saying so many times.  And it's 986 people that were killed by the police last year.  And that's more than 490.

How many times do we have to notice on Dr. King Day that White (patriarchal, homophobic, capitalist) supremacy has what seems like an impossibly firm hold on our lives? A thousand billion trillion million times.

for now

I've got two draft posts -- one on my trip home and one the warden's office (also a trip) -- but can't find the time to work on them.

In the meantime, check out the award I received last night from one of my incarcerated colleagues!