Tag: season 2

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m traveling today, and my suspicion is that not too many eyes will fall upon these words, as this is not the sort of day when people surf the web looking at blogs by fledgling writers. I will keep this short, in case these words do reach you somehow. I don’t want to keep you.

I live in Massachusetts, where this whole tradition began, under a dark, bloody cloud. I’ve attended the National Day of Mourning in Plymouth. I know some of the history of King Phillip’s War and its aftermath. So much of the history of this country I call home is built upon horror and hatred, wholesale misery and profound suffering.

For my family, as it likely is for yours, this day has been and continues to be about togetherness and appreciation, and maybe a little bit about overzealous eating. I embrace this tradition, because it’s a good and important thing to do — to honor family and to be thankful.

But we should also remember King Phillip, and the churchgoing Indians who were the first and most devastated victims of the war that bears his name. We should remember a time two hundred years later, when Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé, ran for their lives across the frozen Northwest, starving at the same time that American families were having Thanksgiving feasts, thanking the Lord for the bounty they had, not even knowing the name of King Phillip. If they thought about Chief Joseph at all, those thoughts were not in any way warm with gratitude, or tinged with remorse.

They should have been.

Perhaps we can hold some humility in our hearts along with our joy? Perhaps we can also hold to some vision and some intention towards a better, more inclusive, more compassionate future? We can’t change the past, but what if we do these things?

  • Remember your loved ones, and in that context, remember the value of human life.
  • Share what you have with those around you. This is the spirit of family that I remember as the central tenet of so many Native American tribes.
  • Remember the price that has been paid for this bountiful life. It is the debt that goes with the gratitude of the day.

May you be blessed, and may you recognize your blessings and where they’ve come from.

In that spirit, I thank you for your attention to these words.

Reflecting on “A Fantastic Woman”

Be careful! There may be spoilers ahead, if you haven’t seen this movie yet, but want to!

Later this evening, I’ll be leading a discussion after a screening of the Academy Award-Winning film A Fantastic Woman at the Bright Family Screening Room at Emerson College. I’m very excited to do this: I love this film.

I love how it shows Marina’s inner life without being overt. Much of this is shown directly through Daniela Vega’s performance, but there are times when the film uses a kind of emotional impressionism, such as the scene where Marina is walking against the wind and she’s leaning forward, almost parallel to the ground, still pushing forward.

I love the various ways the film represents her isolation: the cold, almost stalkerish way the camera follows her from across the street, or from behind. Even in the wide shots, she’s alone, vulnerable. There’s a time when she has, as nearly as we can tell, been entirely abandoned. It rains, and she has nowhere to take cover, so she keeps walking. What else can she do? Sometimes there’ll come a close-up, and Marina will look directly into the camera, meeting our regard, offering a challenge and a reproach.

A-Fantastic-Woman-Full-Width

And yet, she is saved by her allies several times in this movie. At the end of that walk through the wind and the rain, she comes to a friend’s apartment. They let her in. That resonated strongly with my own experience. A trans person who goes through gender realignment faces significant loss. I know of virtually no one who’s gone through transition who would disagree. But we’re also held together through our support system. Without that refuge, without people in our lives who accept us, we’re in an almost insurmountably difficult position.

A Fantastic Woman shows this to us. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Marina is unflaggingly determined. She despairs. She’s brought low more than once in the course of the film’s story. But she keeps moving and the world moves around her: often in opposition, sometimes in support, though it often feels like the opposing forces are stronger and more prevalent.

Ultimately it’s her own determination that brings her some closure and some peace. It’s her own strength, scant moments here and there of good fortune scattered in with the catastrophe she faces, including a few friends, that carry her through to a new stability.

Some of the movies I’ve seen about trans people seem to be directed mainly at a cis, heteronormative audience: fewer are aimed specifically at trans folk themselves. A Fantastic Woman speaks to all audiences. It universalizes Marina’s experience by placing us at times at that stalkerish distance, and at other times letting us look over her shoulder, and also staring at us levelly, through Marina’s eyes. When she experiences transphobia, no punches are pulled. Some characters in this movie are very up front in their hateful attitudes. Marina is seen as a suspect for no other reason than her presence and the fact of her history. Those who care about her are shown no less honestly.

Marina herself makes foolish choices, though we fully understand and sympathize with her reasons for making them. She is neither a saint nor a warrior. But even so, given the chance, she faces the ugliness of her circumstances and gives back beauty. When we get to the final scene of the film, a long shot that pushes in to a tight close-up, what is revealed through also exposes our own humanity.

Some Thoughts In the Wake of This Week’s Election

Results of Tuesday’s election were not conclusive enough for anyone to feel particularly triumphant, nor entirely defeated. We must move past “us” and “them” if we are to move forward as a country. How do we do that?

While it may not have been a resounding victory for either of the country’s two major political “tribes,” I consider the 2018 election to be about as positive a result as we could have hoped for. We remain a deeply divided country. The election results reflect that. Any result that went farther in one direction or the other would have been seen by the other side as unjust.

Even so, the current status quo satisfies no one. Both of our major ideological camps suffer from groupthink and blind spots, and both sides view the other as not dealing with reality. I see that both sides use critical thinking, but selectively: only to question the opposition’s narrative, never the one they subscribe to.

President Trump manufactures a constant string of lies (6420 untruths documented in his first 649 days as President.) He uses anti-press rhetoric as a smoke screen. It’s a strategy that’s proven effective with those that already agree with him. Trump does have a point about the press, yet completely obliterates it with his deliberate lying. Still, the mainstream press is not innocent, and is subject to the wishes and demands of its corporate ownership.

The charge “fake news!” resonates because there’s some validity to it. The media exhibits pro-corporate bias, constantly offers up false equivalencies, oversimplifies complex issues, and ignores important stories that contradict the accepted narrative the media is at pains to keep intact. Over the years, the press has done enough damage to its own credibility that the president’s protests fall on some sympathetic ears, even though he sources much of his information from a television news outlet that falsifies information more than almost any other.

Not that the competing opposite-partisan cable news outlet fares all that much better when fact-checked.

No wonder trust in the news media is so low. Yet those who consume news invariably choose sources that confirm their biases rather than posting the complicated and sometimes even contradictory truth. The cost of this is as we see: a democracy that functions less and less well, and a population that increasingly fails to realize that we are all in the same leaky boat.

We shut each other out when we should be listening most intently to the voices we disagree with. We decide that those who can’t even accept what we know are facts are just not worth talking to. Without the ability to reason with each other, we subject those we disagree with to dehumanizing ad hominem assumptions. The only response we see as valid in these circumstances is force. We have to win our victories at the polls, and when we don’t win there, we don’t accept defeat, we just become more bitterly entrenched, because they won’t see what we maintain is simple common sense. How can anything but tragedy result?

My suggestion is that we try something new… well, actually old, as old as the age of reason, as old as Socrates, as old as the Buddha. Let’s try dialogue. Let’s listen to each other. Let’s look for the ways we agree rather than the ways our position is superior to those we disagree with.

Dialogue begins with humility and compassion: two things sorely lacking in our current environment, and which we desperately need to cultivate. It’s important to understand that dialogue isn’t surrender, it isn’t weakness. Dialogue actually requires great personal strength and integrity, along with a willingness to be vulnerable. Dialogue has a lot in common with love. You could say that it’s a way of loving humanity, because it seeks uplift in a dynamic way, as opposed to debate, which seeks to declare a winner and a loser.

I think we’ve had enough of picking winners at others’ expense.

Election Jitters 2018

A meditation

As a transgender person and a Green, I’m viewing the trends in US culture and politics with increasing concern. In the days leading up to next week’s election, I monitor polling at FiveThirtyEight and elsewhere, looking for signs of what’s to come.

That FiveThirtyEight was less than accurate in the 2016 election cycle means that  I can’t trust what I see in those maps and charts. I honestly have no idea what this country will wake up to this coming Wednesday morning. Like many of my friends, I can neither look away nor stop fretting about it. It’s difficult not to feel that the future of this country — that my own future — hangs in the balance.

My hunch is that things are going to go a little better than expected for the left. I’ve seen signs that point in other directions: I also recognize that living in Massachusetts puts me in a liberal bubble; things in Texas or Indiana may fail to conform to my expectations. The polling aggregators show the conventional wisdom, that the Democratic party will retake the House of Representatives, but that the Senate is most likely to continue in Republican hands. That’s not the best of all possible worlds, but it would at least slow down the rapid slide towards fascism the country may currently be in.

Many of the more vulnerable folks in this country won’t fare well, even under the stasis of a partial Democratic victory, but the status quo is better in the short run than the regression towards darkness that I fear. The problem is that the status quo is not nearly good enough. Protecting and uplifting our most vulnerable citizens will still not be done as it should given the best possible results of Tuesday’s vote.

I have a sneaking hope that the Democrats will take back control of the Senate as well as the House, because the effects of recent events may not be showing up yet in current polling. There is some Republican backlash against the Trump contingent, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the establishment media overemphasizes this.

Should the Republican Party maintain control of all branches of government as a result of Tuesday’s election, I fear that some Americans may not be safe. There have been threats made, and recent events have underlined those threats: for instance the MAGAbomber attacks on prominent Trump critics and two racially-motivated mass shootings, all in the last week. Trump himself has said that there will be violence if the Democrats should fare well instead, though he falsely claims that leftists will instigate it.

I’m trying to keep my optimism, and hoping we all find our way past the delusional tendencies of these times. May the country move towards justice come Tuesday.

Purslane

This is my first writing on the subject of the eastern Roman Empire.

“Americans don’t know about this,” the older woman whose family owns the liquor store near us, who I think is Turkish, told my wife. She pointed to a low, kind of scrubby looking plant that was coming up through a crack in the sidewalk in front of the store. “See that? That plant is delicious, but to an American, it’s just a weed.”

purslane 2

Indeed, we had the same plant in our own garden, and had been pulling it as a weed the whole time. Because our neighbor called our attention to it, we went looking online for information. The woman had called it purslane. We found recipes and botanical information. It is, indeed, a commonly-eaten plant in many parts of the world. Its habitat ranges throughout the middle east, and from India all through the Balkans and other parts of eastern Europe. It also grows through much of North America, though it’s not a native plant.

Purslane plants grow to be about a foot or so in diameter as they lay close to the ground, with juicy, red-tinged vines and succulent green leaves smaller than a dime and teardrop-shaped. It blooms in the morning – little quarter-inch yellow flowers pop up in the elbows of the vines – and then the blooms close by the afternoon.

Morning is also the best time to pick it; you take the whole plant right out of the ground, root and all. Purslane produces oxalic and malic acids overnight, with its pores closed to keep in moisture, then converts those acids to sugar and metabolizes that sugar through the day. Pick it first thing in the morning, and the acid gives the plants a lemony tang. Cut them up, stems and all, and either toss them into a salad raw or cook them for stews and other uses. On the streets of Istanbul, it’s sold wrapped in puff pastry as a street food.

Purslane is first known to have been in North America in the thirteenth century in Canada, which suggests that it may have been brought here by the Vikings, perhaps when Erik the Red first came to the shores of Labrador, perhaps brought either intentionally as a dependable food source – the plants are hardy and low-maintenance — or accidentally as seeds stuck in somebody’s boots or clothes or baggage.

But if the Vikings brought it to North America, how did they come to have it? It’s a desert-adapted plant growing in the opposite corner of Europe from them.

I found that the Byzantine Empire had employed Norsemen as elite mercenaries, some even working their way into the hierarchy of the Empire. I imagine Viking soldiers spending years campaigning in the southern Balkans, then going home carrying the seeds of purslane in their belongings, in the seams of their clothing, boots, or bedding. Perhaps those same warriors then made their way across the Atlantic to Labrador, where the tiny black seeds, barely discernable from grains of dark sand, finally came to rest and began sprouting on the low hillsides of eastern Canada.

Now purslane grows through cracks in the sidewalks, in gardens and fields all over this continent. In it I see a connection to lost Byzantium, which disappeared from the Earth in the first week of June in 1453, destroyed after standing for 1123 years by the Ottoman Turks. I’ve walked past clumps of purslane, or pulled it as a weed from my garden, oblivious to its history, every warm, bright day of my life.

It’s a consequence of having a name for a thing. That naming seems almost to change the physical shape of the thing, as well as what surrounds it. What was a “weed” as I tossed it into a lawn and leaf bag now connects to a world of knowledge I’d never considered. Learning about Byzantium itself has been the same sort of revelatory experience. The hook for that story also comes from learning a better name for the thing.

The people who lived within its borders didn’t call themselves “Byzantines.” That was applied to them only centuries after the Empire’s demise by historians trying to make a distinction the people themselves never made. If you had asked those people to identify themselves, they would have told you that they were Romans, right up until the day the Ottoman Emperor Muhammad II broke into the Sanctuary of Hagia Sophia on June the 4th, 1453 and destroyed the altar, the symbolic act ending the Empire.

In trying to better understand the nature of that society, those who study it have made it unrecognizable to the people who lived in it. By learning that one fact, I have become fascinated with the Byzantines and how their civilization has shaped the world we live in, from the seemingly insignificant things like purslane, through the answers to some long-standing questions I’ve had.

For instance, how is it that the Muslims seemed unstoppable and carried their holy war throughout the middle east and northern Africa to the Iberian Peninsula, where they ruled for centuries, yet they didn’t storm across Europe from east to west at the same time? The answer is plain to those who know the history of Byzantium. The Empire was the bulwark that saved western Europe so that it could become the cradle of modern western society.

It sparked the Renaissance as a center of learning throughout medieval times, and when it finally collapsed, scholars and artisans fled to Italy and fostered some of the great thinkers of succeeding generations. We owe much to these people, whom most of us never knew to be Romans, whose civilization fell a mere forty years, well within the living memory of the last of them, before Columbus (who some believe may have been a Byzantine himself) crossed the Atlantic to find a land that had already been touched indirectly by those latter-day Romans, it would seem, in the form of viny, succulent, tangy, little-known purslane.