pronoia

All the Queers are White, All the Blacks are Straight; or, Seriously? We're Still Falling For This Nonsense?

It's taken me a while to recover from the news about Proposition 8. While I know that the march of progress will continue, it's hard to be the ones whose lives and relationships hang in the balance in the meantime.

And I'm pretty disturbed by the turn the conversation around Prop 8 has taken -- blaming people of color and in particular Black people for its passing. The argument seems to be that the extra people-of-color turnout for Obama is about the same as the margin of victory -- therefore, it's their fault.

This argument is specious on so many levels, not the least of which is that A HUGE PROPORTION OF WHITE VOTERS HAD TO VOTE FOR IT TO PASS BEFORE THESE "NEW" VOTERS WOULD HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE. In fact, FiveThirtyEight.com has a lovely rebuttal of the blame game, pointing out that if California's electorate had been the same as it was in 2004, the measure would have passed with an even greater margin.

But do we then have news stories arguing that white people are homophobic? No, we don't. And we don't because we don't ever assume that white people do anything as a block, but we do assume that people of color are homogenous. Does the news media stop to think about the fact that there are people of color who are also queer? Or that many people of color are highly progressive, while many white people are very, very, very conservative? Apparently not.

One of the things stories like this accomplishes is to further balkanize different identity groups. Let me be clear: white-identified/begun equity movements have often brought such balkanization upon ourselves by assuming that white experience constituted the whole of the movement. Just look at the history of feminism and the ways it excluded the experience of women of color as well as queers. LGBT struggles have often done the same thing: assumed that white (often male) experience was the "norm" and marginalized everything else.

But moments like blaming minorities for the passage of Proposition 8 only reinforce such division and hatred. What they really do is suggest that there's only room for one (non-male, non-white, non-straight, non-rich) identity group at the table at any one time -- and so we have to fight each other to be that chosen group.

Resist this. Resist the idea that we are in competition, that justice for one group necessarily means injustice for another. Resist the idea that the groups are themselves separate and homogenous, that we don't all overlap each other in so many ways.

Stories like this, they're business as usual. While I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe they're deliberate, they participate in an age-old consolidation of power that keeps those out of power unbalanced, disconnected, and squabbling.

There is room for all of us at the table. All of us. One day. But we have to stop falling for the idea that we're not all in this together.

And a shoutout to my white, queer friends: examine your own racism in this. Seriously.

But also

Despite all of my optimism and elation about the presidential election and what that means for our country, I'm also mired in despair: California voters passed proposition 8 amending their constitution to ban gay marriage.

Arizona, Arkansas, and Florida also passed gay marriage bans, but when a state that already won't let me get married says, essentially, "and we mean it!", well, I just want to give them the finger.

But California is different. In California, it was legal for a brief, shining moment. And thousands -- tens of thousands -- of people who were married just yesterday woke up today not-married -- becauase bigots decided we can't play their reindeer games.

If you're married, if you're legally married, can you imagine what that must be like?

Today my heart is full and broken, both at the same time.

A New Day

I never blogged about politics, mostly because I'm sure all of you know without my having to say it who this queer girl was voting for, but also because if you were undecided, you wouldn't be looking to me to help you out.

But yesterday I woke up to a country that had never elected anyone but white men to our highest office, and I went to bed in a country that has a Black man as our President-Elect. I woke up today in a country where more people can see themselves reflected in the halls of power. I woke up today in a country that did more than pay lip service to the ideals of equality.

This will not, as some of my friends are saying, magically make everything else different. Partisan politics still abound, religious fundamentalism and racism and classism and sexism and ableism and all the other isms are still putting limits on what people can become, and we've still got to find ways to address the economy and the wars and many other things. But this is a step, a change, and whatever happens next, this happened. We were there. We remember when.

Tax Day

Last night I sat down and finally finished my taxes. I did them originally in January, and we filed Ms. P's then as well, but she was getting money back and I was owing money, and so I sent hers and kept mine so we could eke a few more dollars of interest out of those funds.

I'm confronted with the extra-legal status of our relationship at many turns: when I sign up for an IRA and have to claim myself as single and my beneficiary as my non-spouse; when I get a new job and have to fill out forms; when I answer demographic surveys. But nowhere is this confrontation as prickly for me as it is when I sit down to do our taxes.

All of our money is joint money. We have a shared savings account, a shared checking account, and a shared money market account. Our retirement money is separate, as IRAs require of everyone, but our income and our expenses are so intertwined that there's no sense of "hers" and "mine"; there is only ours.

And yet, when I sit down to do taxes, there is hers and there is mine. Right now it's fairly simple: paychecks officially come to one or the other of us; interest income counts as mine because the account is "officially" mine, despite her being a joint owner; 401(k) payout taxes are officially mine. But what happens when we adopt a child? What happens if we, at some point down the line, buy a house together?

I know straight couples who buy houses together and have children together and choose not to marry. They willingly take on the extra burdens of figuring out taxes and apportioning fiscal responsibility in the most advantageous way. But we did choose to marry, and our choice has no bearing on our taxes, or our legal relationship to one another, or our ability to protect our family from fiscal disaster.

If we were able to file jointly as married, our taxes would have come out to about a wash and they would have been done three months ago. If we were able to file jointly as married, we would get the full "refund" of the economic stimulus package, instead of only getting half of it because Ms. P is far below the cut-off and this year, because of the aforementioned 401(k) fun, I'm over the line.

If we were able to file jointly as married, our outsides would match our insides, and we wouldn't exist in a kind of reality-shifting no-man's land that questions, at every turn, the actuality of our lives. There are days when the constant stress of having to assert the reality our lives, our relationship, our family becomes visible as stress, as a constant activity we engage in, and this is one of those days.

A Portrait of Food in Three Acts, or, Recent Thoughts on Food, Part 1

We're at the grocery store buying the fruit and raw dipping veggies to supplement a pizza dinner for 35 people.

The woman in front of us has exactly two items: a case of ramen noodles and a 20-lb. bag of rice. When the ramen rings up, she gets excited, asks if the price is really what she thinks it is, and runs away to get two more cases of ramen noodles. Her bill comes to $14.95.

We buy two five-pound bags of oranges and apples, a couple of bags of baby carrots and snow peas, some dip. Our bill comes to $52.

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Mr. Burns and I are taking a significant donor and a significant prospect out to lunch. We go to what is reputably the best Italian restaurant in town. The room is hushed, the linens are ironed, the staff is adept.

I order the quail. The others order lobster ravioli, a beef dish, and a lamb dish. We all order water except for our significant donor, who gets a glass of wine. My food arrives beautifully plated on a small rectangular white dish: four small quail drumsticks, each perched atop alternating 1/2-cup piles of mashed potatoes and sauteed spinach. It's the perfect amount of food--tasty and filling but not overwhelming.

The bill is in the neighborhood of $150.

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Last weekend we investigated CSAs in the area. We found one that essentially runs year-round, that supports several sustainable farms, that has politics we like, that comes in shares for two adults, and that has a pick-up spot that isn't too far out of our way.

It's $850 for the six months of the summer/fall season, and we'll get weekly produce supplemented with the odd dozen eggs or bread or cookies or flowers or other goodies. We do the math--we spend that much and quite a bit more on produce for six months, and the goal of this particular CSA is to keep you from going to the grocery store at all.

We write three checks, each dated a month apart, to pay the $850 in three monthly installments before the CSA begins in June.

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Do we really need to ask what's causing the obesity epidemic in the United States? Do we really need to look any farther than what food is available to which of our citizens and at what prices?

We're reading Michael Pollan's fantastic book The Omnivore's Dilemma, in which he looks at four systems of food production in the US: the industrial global food conglomerates, the organic industrial food system (i.e., Whole Foods), sustainable farming, and hunting/foraging. It's simultaneously fascinating, disturbing, and inspiring.

Ina May Gaskins, the grandmother of the modern midwifery movement, says the first rule of nutrition in pregnancy is this: eat food. And by eat food, she means, eat things that you know what they are, things you can identify. In an article in the New York Times' Sunday Magazine, Pollan suggests a similar rule for non-pregnant people: eat things with five or fewer ingredients that you can pronounce and identify.

It's hard to read the book and not take it even further. Do you have any idea how many things we call food are made from the same two ingredients: feed corn and soybeans? We are being served the illusion of choice and plenty while simultaneously being restricted to two basic ingredients that aren't, in the end, very nutritious for human consumption.

Pollan makes a convincing argument that what we eat is even, in the end, less important than what the animals we eat have themselves eaten. Modern industrial animal farming is entirely driven by feed corn, which is not the natural food for cows, pigs, or chickens (much less salmon), and that, combined with the speed at which the animals are fed and grown, means that their composition is much less healthy for us than they were once. Studies are showing that corn-fed beef causes heart disease in a way that grass-fed beef just doesn't, because the essential balance of fatty acids changes.

I expected to come out of this book deciding to be a vegetarian, but that didn't happen. I've come out of the book inspired to commit to local agriculture in a truly profound way, to do as much of our grocery shopping through farmer's markets and CSAs and metropolitan buying clubs and our own garden as I possibly can. Without even looking hard we can buy grass-fed beef and free-range (really free-range, not just technically free-range) eggs and pastured pork and lamb and goat. (Chicken, for some reason, is proving a bit more complicated.)

As one of the farmers he talks to points out, it only looks like the food is more expensive. Sustainable agriculture is honest in the sense that there are no hidden costs: no government subsidies, no pollution and cleanup or lack thereof, no fossil fuel consumption that allows us to eat nectarines grown in Argentina, no risk of global economic collapse that leaves us starving. Of every dollar I spend, 95 cents ends up in the pocket of the farmer who actually grew the vegetables and pastured the pig, instead of 4 cents ending up with the corn farmer and 96 cents going to Monsanto and Arthur Daniels Midland and Cargill and General Foods and Halliburton and goddess only knows who else.

This is true, and at the same time, it does cost more money, pound for pound, to eat this way. I happen to think it should cost a significant part of our budgets to feed ourselves well, that skimping on food is the kind of thing that has a significant bodily and spiritual cost. But there are people in our country--many, many people--who cannot afford (and sometimes cannot even physically access) produce and good meat from the industrial complex as it is, much less from sustainable agriculture as it ought to be.

Pollan does not address the question of nationwide food economics directly, only obliquely; it is not his subject. It should be one of ours. I have the opportunity (and thus, I believe, the obligation), to choose sustainability. I can afford it and I can access it, and while our choice will not bring down the global industrial food complex, it does help elbow out a space for people who want to opt out of that system. And even as I embark on this journey, I am conscious of how much it is a measure of my privilege that I can do so. I don't have any answers for how that can or will change, but it is on my mind tonight as Ms. P cooks up potato-leek soup and lentil-kale soup and roasts asparagus and boils freshly-made pasta and stirs up a meat-sauce with grass-fed ground beef.

For us this is both as simple as buying our food from a new source and as profound as changing our sense of our place in the world. Buying and eating this way is to commit to living a mindful interconnectedness, to really knowing what has died so that we may live, to celebrating not our collective social sense of humans as the top of the food chain but our implicitly-known sense of humans as always collaborating with other species to be, in fact, the body of the world.

Sweet Jesus on a Submarine

I grew up in the Navy, and while I was in high school we were stationed at Pearl Harbor. There was a big fancy church over near the piers, but for reasons I've never learned, my family went to Mass at the small submarine base chapel. There are many things to love about this chapel; it was built by submariners in honor of their fellow dolphins who had died during the war, it was built secretly since the application for it was denied, and every window has a small submarine somewhere on it. But my favorite part is the stained-glass window in the choir loft, which depicts Jesus standing, arms open wide, on top of a submarine.

Early on in our friendship I happened to mention this, innocently, to Ms. P, who exploded. "How can someone have done that?" she asked. "Putting Jesus on a WEAPON like that is ... just wrong!" She continued to talk about how Jesus didn't approve of force and certainly wouldn't have liked nuclear submarines and how associating him with them was tantamount to the awful claim--popular in some crowds--that Jesus loves us best and will help us prevail in a military fight. I replied, somewhat taken aback, that while Jesus may not approve of the military, the military families left behind, whose husband/wife/father/mother/son/daughter was off under the ocean in a tin can, deserved the comfort of religion as much as anyone else. We went around and around about this, then and several times thereafter. Each time, I had the feeling that I was speaking some other language, that what I was saying wasn't somehow coming out as English. Years later, one of us brought this up again, our perpetual fight, and Ms. P said, somewhat shamefacedly, that the thing she had missed during all of those conversations was that a submarine, while a weapon, wasn't only a weapon--that there were people inside of it.

I had the same experience a few days ago when a coworker of mine told me, with both a voice of wonder and the sure confidence that we were in accord on this matter, that he had been to a military funeral recently and that he had expected it to be really awful, really pompous, and it ended up being really moving. He was quick to point out that he is a pacifist, lest I think that being moved by a funeral suggests that he supports the war in Iraq.

In both cases, I was confronted by my own experience--what I know and what I find familiar. I once didn't notice a military museum outside of town for several years because, let's face it, I grew up in environs that decorated with tanks, missles, planes, and such, and they fade into the background for me. I was also confronted with the complexity of thinking about the military and one's stance, and how otherwise thoughtful, well-meaning people can dismiss everything military out of hand.

Let me be clear: I am also a pacifist. I deplore the choices our government has made in the last several decades with regards to using our military. I believe our government has, in fact, treated our military with appalling condescension and thoughtlessness, especially as they continue to cut funds to support military families, keep National Guards overseas for years at a time when they aren't getting paid, and bring dead soldiers home as freight. I hate that we attract primarily poor kids to the military because it seems like a way out, and I hate that low-ranking people are being courtmartialed for torture while the ringleaders like the Commander in Chief escape wrath.

But I also hate that some liberals assume all military personnel must be hard-core conservatives, that some people dismiss those who serve as brainwashed or stupid, or that people underestimate the real psychological effects on service personnel of being trained to do that which we're told we must never do: kill other human beings. I still see a place in this world for the military, even if I think we jump to use the military far more often than is warranted even without lying politicians making up reasons to march on their enemies. I am not yet evolved enough to turn the other cheek, and I don't know whether I ever will be.

We were at Pearl during the first Gulf War, and I knew wives who came home one day to phone messages from their husbands saying they'd been shipped out last minute and they'd call when they could. I knew people who got married quickly because who knew if they'd have the chance again and a wife has legal opportunities a girlfriend never does. I know people whose marriages finally couldn't withstand the months-long absences and the power struggles between wives who had been keeping families going singlehandedly and husbands who expected to be able to take their "rightful" place as head of the family when they returned. While my own family's experience with the military was fairly uneventful, we lived on bases full of other military families whose experiences weren't always so benign.

And so I bristle when people take their global opposition to war, or to this war, or to global politics, or to the general militarization of our time, and then assume that the particular individuals involved must, to a person, be stupid or awful or what have you. While the personal is the political, the global is not always--or even often--the same as the particular. People cannot be reduced to an administration's policies. I hope everyone who wants one has a picture of Jesus on a submarine, and I will always be moved by the rituals of people who choose to take on a role most of us wouldn't dream of.