8 November 04
Hope is the Thing with Feathers
This morning as I was getting my bike out along the driveway past all the beekeeping equipment on my way to work—in a hurry, I was late—a rock wren popped out into a small patch of sunlight.
I have a special fondness for wrens, as I mentioned recently in a comment over at Via Negativa. They’re small, they’re not very brightly colored, but they are cheerfully busy. They chatter. They scold. They have personallity.
Then, coming home tonight, way after dark after a dinner in Sacramento commiserating with some friends about Tuesday’s results, I heard some geese calling overhead through the fog. I’m pretty sure they were white fronted geese. Winter is here: our valley is flooded in parts and the waterfowl take over. Switching places with the ducks, they move out in to the fields to feed at night.
It is hard to stay in a place of despair with this around me: a rock wren and night-feeding geese.
7 November 04
Seen on a Trip to the Coop
It’s rare to see political graffiti in the US, but maybe times are a-changing. We spotted this today on the side of a large shed the other side of the railroad tracks from the food coop in Davis. Is the ambiguity in the message intentional, or do they need an editor?
6 November 04
Gossamer
The spiders spin a strand, jump onto it, and drop into the breeze. They can travel for thousands of miles like this. We looked up into the sky today as we walked through the Arboretum and there were hundreds of them, floating softly like white wisps of dreams, waiting to make a good landfall. It’s a leap of random faith: unlike fledgling birds that make their first southward migration without really knowing where they’re going but that can at least rely on instinct, and the southward sun to aim for, and some kind of internal magnet, the spiders are completely at the mercy of the winds that carry them aloft.
Numenius and I looked up at the gossamer and we talked about hatred.
There’s a lot of it about. Liberals don’t like to use the word about themselves, it’s somehow dirty, it’s what THEY—the others—do and have and spread. Not us. But over the last few days many people I know—most of them in the blogosphere—have admitted to feeling hatred. (In addition to anger, rage, grief, perplexity, dumfoundedness, fear nay terror, numbness, isolation, like running away, like getting a long-lapsed antidepressant prescription refilled, and so on.)
Butuki over at Laughing~Knees is asking some pretty tough ones, questioning our assumptions about who we are—as Americans, as voters, as members of the world community. Chris Clarke is expressing in particularly searing form contempt for certain other liberal assumptions. Elck at The Vernacular Body suggests a most intriguing exercise: try to find five things you LIKE about Bush. Rana at Frogs and Ravens is being brutally honest about her emotional roller coaster this week. And over at Velveteen Rabbi, something extraordinary is going on: people are writing, respectfully, really wanting to understand, from somewhat opposite ends of the political spectrum. They are doing what I’ve come to understand as almost impossible: they are really trying to talk.
Here’s what I think we can learn, we liberals who are still reeling from these few days of heartache and disappointment. We have just had a full-on dose of what it feels like to be marginalized. We feel isolated. We see something the victorious don’t see, and they don’t care that we see it. Our truths are irrelevant to them. We feel like we don’t matter. We feel judged because of who we voted for, assumptions are made about us. We read about and hear people writing us off, and it hurts. (Some of the things said are, well, hateful.)
Well, guess what. A significant fraction of Americans feels like this ALL THE TIME. Whether marginalized by the color of their skin or the way they speak or the work they do or the trailer they live in. Welcome to their world. And, since this fraction is one we’d like to have on our side, maybe we can use the experience to LISTEN to them for once instead of assuming we know what’s good for them and telling them to vote for us or with us.
That, and explore this hatred thing a bit more. Look inside a bit. And leap out and jump into the sky on a strand of gossamer, trusting to the universe to provide…
5 November 04
While We Fulminate…
The young take action.
The most encouraging news I came across today was that about 85 students in Boulder High School in Colorado staged a protest in the school library, saying they were concerned about the future of the country and refusing to leave until Republican politicians came and met with them. No Republican came to speak with them—a spokesman for Governor Owen told them the best way for them to practice democracy was to go back to their classroom—but their Democratic congressman, Mark Udall, came over and spoke with them for about an hour.
The students consider their action a success.
4 November 04
Learning Difference
This evening I led a discussion following a showing of the film of Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight at one of the undergraduate housing complexes here at UC Davis.
My co-leader bailed; she had a calculus test. (I’d rather be almost anywhere than in a calculus test, so I let her go happily.) But I don’t interact with undergrads very often and was a little nervous. The group ended up being about 35, about 30 more than I was expecting.
After the film it emerged that two of the students had been living in LA at the time of the Rodney King riots; the father of one of them was a policeman. She was a little shaken by the portrayal of the cops in the film (well, it’s true they don’t come off so well). It was good for the other students (and me) to hear her perspective; her father spent over two weeks with almost no sleep.
We then did an exercise where each person wrote down a time they had felt out of place—followed by something they might say to the people that made them feel this way. The cards were shuffled and everyone read out a different person’s card.
Here are three at random:
“When I moved to a new school, I felt out of place. I would have told the other students to give me a chance to show what kind of person I was, rather than judging me.”
“I felt out of place around my boyfriend’s hispanic and black friends. I grew up in a wealth white/asian community, while my boyfriend grew up in a poorer diverse community. Although I never felt any classism or racism toward his friends, I never felt totally accepted as a person. I was always seen as a “rich white girl.”
“After the elections, I was in a study group with some of my long-time study friends. They all happened to be Republican and chided me about my Democratic beliefs and my opinion of the outcome of the election. Though at the time I felt uneasy and out of place, I know that if the elections had turned out the opposite way, our feelings toward each other would have been reversed.”
I learned a lot this evening. These students have much to teach me. We need to keep talking to each other, all of us…
3 November 04
Routed
I spent the day alternating between despair and deep anger, vanquishing the elation of last week’s Red Sox victory. But here’s one thought I ran across today that however trivial, seems apropos. The Red Sox fans kept the faith. For 86 years each spring their hopes would be up, only to be dashed by season’s end. But they never gave up on their team. And one year, they finally won. We lost, and we will lose again. But one day victory will be ours, if we keep up the hope.
Jarrett has started a blog on place and politics, and has some initial ponderings about the geography of this election. This topic may be a starting point for me to regroup: to begin diving into the county-level patterns in the election data and see how it compares to demographic information. And maybe I’ll end up with interesting maps and charts for all to see.
2 November 04
1 November 04
The Feline Neighborhood
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on cats and place.
Berkeley owes much to its cats, I once read. Or at least I owe much to them: when I was growing up near there, going on walks and meeting the neighborhood cats was my main contact with the feline deities, since we didn’t have cats at home. I wonder now if there’s a relationship between neighborhoods that are good from a cat’s point of view, and neighborhoods that have been built for walkers. After all, one of life’s great pleasures to go for walk and meet up with a friendly cat. Village Homes, the archetype in this town of a humanely-planned development, certainly has many cats contentedly roaming the interior walkways and sunning themselves on vine-bestrewn wooden fences. The photographer Hans Silvester is justly celebrated for his photographs of Greek village cats. And who wouldn’t want to walk around a Greek island village?
We need to ask the cats their opinion on urban design. Will a feline Christopher Alexander come forward, please?
31 October 04
Cats and Place
This entry is for the Ecotone wiki’s joint blogging topic, Cats and Place.
Never really having been a cat person before it’s been interesting to watch what were two feral kittens grow into something resembling adult cats—with no adult training. They know how to find warm spots in the house; they react to chaos in a chaotic way, attempting to reverse it; they play with all kinds of things they shouldn’t and shun cat-specific toys.
What to learn from a cat: find a place you like and take over; eat; nap a lot. (Don’t go into scholarly publishing, in other words.)
30 October 04
Dashing Into A Swing State
Today we went on our day trip to Carson City, Nevada for a little bit of get-out-the-vote work. We met Susan and Barbara at nine in town in Davis and rode in Susan’s Subie Forester. Our first stop was just outside Auburn for fuel. The attendant at the gas station, a middle-aged guy with a long white beard, said we were the third group to pass through wearing Kerry-Edwards buttons, and wondered if there was a rally somewhere. We explained we were headed to Nevada. He said he was probably the only person in his precinct to be supporting Kerry, and they knew who he was! On the way over the mountain, we passed another car clearly filled with volunteers; we waved and they waved back.
We were told to arrive by 1 PM; there was no point in doing work in the morning since it was Nevada Day (celebrating the founding of the state) and there was a big parade downtown. Our coordinator was Kris, a youngish guy wearing a Yes on Kerry, No on Yucca Mountain t-shirt, who’s been at this since mid-August. Our brief was to visit voters not so much to persuade them to support Kerry but to get them to go to the polls, and offer them help if they needed any. Volunteers had already contacted most of the registered Democratic voters, so we started in on the non-partisan voters.
Nevada has early elections: one of the things we discovered is that a large fraction of the people have already voted. The people we talked to seemed pretty evenly split between Bushites and Kerry supporters—it is a swing state after all—and we had only one overtly hostile encounter. We figure our afternoon’s efforts probably netted the cause a couple more voters, and certainly helped the Carson City locals cover more ground. Kerry’s sister Peggy was in town campaigning today as part of the Nevada Day activities, and Anne Richards, the former governor of Texas who was defeated in 1994 by Bush, will be speaking there tomorrow, so Carson City is definitely getting some upper-level attention.
We stopped at a restaurant for dinner on the way back. On one of the televisions by the bar they had figures from I think the last day of early voting. This showed about 37,000 votes cast, apparently evenly between those registered Democrat and Republican. I think this is a good sign for Kerry, since far more Republicans are going to cross over and vote Kerry than vice-versa.