How To Do This

Let's face it. Our hearts are in tatters. How do we handle it?

Seriously, I'm asking. I'll take any ideas. I'll work through a few here, but I'm open to suggestions.

I have this picture of us like we're crawling along the snowy ground like the soldiers at Valley Forge, clothes reduced to rags, spirits all but crushed, in danger of losing the thread. That frayed, barely there thread that connects us to...everything real and true and right and worth living and dying for.

I rarely get this melodramatic these days, but these are melodramatic days. I mean, honest to god, I woke up this morning out of a dream that I was a player in a Shakespearean masterpiece, just one of the zillions of men and women merely players.. Felt real as this chair I'm sitting on, costumes and all, iambic pentameter, the whole nine.

I'm not here to talk about the president because I'm too sick of him for words and it gets us nowhere. I'm here to talk about us, because we're all we have, and we're the ones that are going to save us. No great exalted savior rising up to take the reins and make it all go away. Just us, here on the ground.

Here's what I do, you could try this. 

I smile at people. If I'm out at CVS and someone is walking out as I'm walking in, I smile at him, at her. If you're not one to usually do this, and you try it, you might be surprised to see the look of slow delight that comes over someone's face as they smile back. Anyone can do this.

I also joke with people in check-out lines. Check-out lines can be insufferable. People get homicidal in check-out lines. Everybody hates being there. But there's always something funny to touch on. Often it's a tabloid headline. "Oh look! The Queen of England is pregnant with quintuplets!" Before you know it you have a gaggle of people giggling with you. The last time this happened, my 13-year-old daughter was with me, and when we got out to the car she told me, with a sweet grin, "Mommy, you're so cute, you have best friends wherever you go." 

This was the highest praise anyone has ever given me. And for those of you who knew my grandmother, Rosemary Foley Baker, you know where I got it from. I didn't come into the world knowing how to do that. And I haven't been good at it my whole adult life. And I'm not good at it every day. But I work at it, because of what she taught me by being who she was, by doing things like bounding off a 500 mile train trip, 4 hours late because the train had "uncoupled," with stories of a dozen new friends she knew by name. To this day I remember two of them were Tyrone and Randy and they were "real dolls."

I'm perhaps the whitest of white folks you ever will see. Maybe you are too. But I have friends, loved ones, who aren't. I bet you do too. They may fall within the confines of the groups that some psychopaths think don't have a right to be. When I see them, run into to them by surprise in town, or meet up for coffee, we hug. One of my best friends wears a head scarf, I see the wary side glances she gets, I know what some people think of her. When I see her, I hug her tight and kiss her cheek, because I love her...but don't think I don't mean to send a message. This woman is MY friend, MY sister, I dare you to fuck with her. She belongs here as much as I do, as much as you do, make no fucking mistake about it. 

One night when my husband was away I fell down the stairs getting my son a drink, just before dawn, and thought I'd broken my back. Guess what friend came flying to my house at my distress call, got me into an ambulance, made sure both my kids stayed safe and cared for, including my autistic nonverbal one...oh by the way, two out of her three kids at home are autistic too, but still, there she was, so anxious to get to me that she'd forgotten all about her scarf, just raced out the door to get to me, her friend who was in trouble. That's what real Muslims are like, in case anyone was wondering.

We live in a world where a hug, a kiss, a smile for chrissakes, can be an open act of rebellion against hatred. And that's tragic in a sense. But it's also an opportunity. She's not alone, my friend who wears hijab. She's got me, and I'm not the only one she's got.  And your guy-friends who are couples, or girl-friends who are couples, the ones married to each other, or engaged, or dating, and having the nerve to exchange loving looks and/or gestures in public, or (gasp, god forbid) hold hands, they're not alone either. They have you, and me, and legions of others. 

And the Mexican migrant workers in line with me at the bank to cash their checks. Guess what, they're not invisible ghosts-drones. If you know a little Spanish, look what happens to their faces when you compliment them on their adorable kids in your broken, insufficient Spanish, or offer a tissue to the one with the runny nose. It takes a millisecond for the shock to wear off, the shock that a white person has noticed they they're people too, and the smiles come, and the warmth comes, and they even compliment your lousy Spanish because you tried. Their English is a lot better than your Spanish, but at least you tried.

And I may be a lily white girl, but guess what. I have a disabled child. A mentally disabled child. One of the brightest lights this world will ever see, he is. Don't think I don't know what Nazis would do to him. Don't think I don't know. We all know. Do you love someone with a disability? Do you think they're safe from the insanity we saw go down in Charlottesville last Saturday? If we want them to be safe, it's up to us to keep them safe. To keep all the groups they target safe, groups that any of us could fall into, at any time. And that means coming together, as one body, and affirming the following, without exception:

We are all the same. Exactly. The. Same. The ones who act like assholes, and the ones who don't. The ones who root for your baseball team, and the ones who don't (it took a lot for me to admit that one). The ones who have hardly any melanin in their skin, and the ones who have lots. The ones who are descended from slaves, and the ones who are descended from the monsters who were the enslavers. The ones who grew into sexual feelings for people with different kinds of private parts or the same kinds of private parts. The ones who think the Messiah came already, and the ones who are still waiting, and the ones who don't give a shit. People who were born within someone's arbitrary borders, and people who were not. People who think the government should stay the hell out of their business and people who want the government all up in their grill (p.s. there's seriously no difference, at the top of the real pyramid of power they're just using us all as cannon fodder to hurl at each other, wise up.) 

Particles and/or waves, blinking in and out, mostly the space in between...that's all any of us are, and by some unfathomable miracle we get to be alive. Not just alive, conscious. Conscious!  What are the odds???? And so what do we do, notice fake differences between your wave/particles and my wave/particles and kill each other over them? Well that's pretty fucking stupid.

We can do this. I have faith that we can do this.

Keep the faith. And let's do this.

I love you.

T