Table 2 (poem)

Posted on Tue, 5 April 2011 by Mel Green
Table 2

Table 2, from the article "National Prison Population Growth: A BJS Report" in the Winter 1996 issue of the Alaska Justice Forum

Table 2

Between 1980 and 1994 the total number of people held in federal and state prisons and local jails almost tripled — increasing from 501,886 to 1,483,410.

— Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice

I am making a table.  My hammer
is the keyboard of the computer —
tap tap — my nails are the commas
and decimal points that keep these legs
of numbers standing true.
The grain is the roundness of zeros and eights,
leaning spines of nines and percentage signs,
sharp angles of fours and sevens.
I will call this table (slightly
modifying its original name) Table 2:
Number of Adults in Custody
of State or Federal Prisons or in
Local Jails; and though it’s only
a copy, when I’m done it will be
a clearer, cleaner version of
the Bureau of Justice Statistics table
from which I copied it to include
in the Alaska Justice Forum.

But it’s not the ideal table.

Though I’m of that kind, a maker of poems
whom Plato had Socrates exclude
from his rational, perfect Republic —
an imitator of imitations, my work
one step from the carpenter’s table or bed,
but two steps from the idea of table
in the ether around God’s head —
for my day job I’m also of that kind
essential to the Republic.  Sustained
by statisticians, I am a maker
of passionless tables that summarize
in numbers the reasoned philosophy
of this well-ordered State’s philosopher-kings.

But if this poem I make by night is a pale
faded imitation of the table I made by day,
the white spaces between my table’s columns
are paler copies yet of the concrete walls,
steel bars, control rooms, keys, and guns
of guards in towers.  And its numbers in their
hundred thousands, the total in its millions
(seven digits divided by commas)
imitate in mere paper and ink the bodies,
the sweat and sheen and stink of bodies,
the rage and fear and anguish of minds,
the sorrow and grief and violent hatreds
of prisoners one mere step away:

embodying the closest approximation
of the ideal that waxes ineffable
in the ether around God’s head.

[April 15, 1997]

About this poem

Before 1990, most of what I knew about the American justice system came from fiction — books, movies, TV.  Then I took a job as a publication specialist at the UAA Justice Center, which entailed amongst other thinks making lots of tables & charts on various aspect of the justice system.  That’s the lens through which I became aware of the extraordinary growth of correctional populations in the U.S., especially due to the so-called “war on drugs” that began during the Reagan administration.

Sometime in about 2001, the U.S. surpassed the Russian Federation to become the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.  Here we are now (from an article  in our most recent issue of the Alaska Justice Forum):

Figure 3. Rate of Incareration in Selected Nation

Figure 3. Rate of Incareration in Selected Nations (most current data available as of February 2011). From "Prisoner Reentry and the Uniform Collateral Consequences of Conviction Act" by Deborah Periman, Alaska Justice Forum 27(4), Winter 2011.

Makes you feel all proud & patriotic, eh?

As for Plato’s Republic: Plato didn’t much like poets, because the poetic imagination weakened the power & authority of the Plato’s idealized philosopher-king. As James P. Carse writes in The Religious Case Against Belief,

Plato’s Republic is a completely rational and comprehensive system. It is threatened more by the poets than by its military enemies — in fact, it needs those enemies.

Explains a lot, that does.

For my part, most “philosopher-kings,” idealized or not, go off the rails almost from the moment they achieve power & authority. Give me a poet any day.

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“Totally like whatever, you know?” by Taylor Mali

Posted on Mon, 4 April 2011 by Mel Green

Taylor Mali

Taylor Mali. Photo by Emil Brikha via Wikimedia Commons.

The payoff lines of Taylor Mali‘s poem “Totally like whatever, you know?”

Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply QUESTION AUTHORITY.
You have to speak with it, too.

But like, y’know, you gotta hear the whole poem, yeah? And watch the words, too, come to life in this typography animation of the poem by Ronnie Bruce:

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Mali writes on his website,

This video entitled “Typography” is an animated version of a poem of mine by student Ronnie Bruce. I have no idea who he is (and he didn’t ask for permission), but what would you do when the result is so good?

Here’s a live performance of the same poem by Taylor Mali.

About the poet

Taylor Mali is an American slam poet, humorist, teacher, and voiceover artist. And he’s one of the only people who actually makes a living at being a poet!

Tip o’ the nib to Barbara Armstrong, who showed this to me this morning.

Posted in Poems by others | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Vashti Speaks for Herself

Posted on Sun, 3 April 2011 by Mel Green
Teakettle Mountain, Columbia Falls, Montana

Teakettle Mountain, Columbia Falls, Montana. The industrial area that the tracks lead to (at the mountain's foot) is Anaconda Aluminum Company (now Columbia Falls Aluminum Company), where I worked summers during my college years. I took this photo sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Vashti Speaks for Herself

But Queen Vashti refused to come at the king’s command conveyed by the eunuchs. At this the king was enraged, and his anger burned within him. (Esther 1:12)

He said that?  you heard him?  The bastard!
I used to love him.  Some ways I still do . . .
but honey, don’t believe all you hear.
He can put it on Larry King Live,
he can write it up in the Bible
for every preacher to preach,
it’ll still be a goddamn lie. . . .

Did you know my name means beautiful?
He knew it, too, first time he saw me
parked on my bucket, graveyard tired
with the rest of D-shift, waiting for the whistle
to blow us off-clock for that wild headlong hurry
to the changehouse and showers and gate.
All I wanted was clean, and home, and bed.

He was a C-shift man, walking in,
and I felt his eyes, and I felt them the next
morning and morning till finally he spoke.
Didn’t matter then my jeans had holes
from hot cryolite spat like brimstone
from between the devil’s own teeth, or that
my hair was dull and gritty with ore
and my shirt stank of eight hours’ baked-in sweat
and my skin, rough and red from pitchburn,
stung at his whiskers’ kiss.
Grime and all, he saw I was beautiful,
and I saw in him the same.

But no sooner did he stick his ring
on my finger than he wanted to yank
me clean out of my steeltoes, drop me into a dress
at some jewelry counter at six bucks an hour.
He told me a man’s work wasn’t for me.
I guess he thought union wages weren’t, either.
I guess he thought he should be enough for me.

He was the type said his home was his castle.
His was a trailer, east side of town,
all trimmed up in antlered heads
that rode home down the North Fork road every fall
under tarps in his pick-up bed.
He never bought meat— his freezer
was full up with moose and venison steaks.
Stay home, I bring home all we need, he said.
He thought he could rule by the depth of his bellow.
My lungs got real tired proving him wrong.

When he came home that night after eight hours’ swing
and two or three more at the North Fork Saloon
and shook me awake at 3.00 AM
to play pretty hostess to his buncha friends —
goddamn, I was working day-shift that week!
did he think I could work without any sleep? —
yeah, you betcha, I yelled, I said, That’s what you want,
then just shoot me and stuff me and stick marbles in
my sockets and nail me to your goddamn wall.

So yeah, he can say all he wants to about it
and look for a nice quiet good-looking wife.
But it wasn’t him that put through the papers,
it wasn’t him that opened the door.
He didn’t push me, and he didn’t dump me.
I rid him of me — and I rid me of him.

[February 9, 1994]

About this poem

This poem is centered in an aluminum reduction plant in my hometown of Columbia Falls, Montana, where I worked summers during my college years. But the poem’s characters are fiction.

Cryolite is a compound used in the reduction of aluminum, often found in the plant in its molten state.  Ore is what we called alumina, or aluminum oxide, the product of the refining of raw bauxite.  The plant’s function is to reduce it — remove the oxygen—to produce aluminum.  It’s a white powder with much the same appearance and consistency as baking powder. Pitchburn is a chemical burn to the skin, looking and feeling similar to a bad sunburn, caused by exposure to hydrocarbons used in the reduction process. The
North Fork is the North Fork of the Flathead River, Flathead National Forest.

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Mielikki

Posted on Fri, 1 April 2011 by Mel Green

In the Ft. Rich woods

April: National Poetry Month.  I’ll be (trying to) post a poem every day this month, some mine, some not mine.  Today, one of mine — fitting in well with my recent preoccupations with matters of spirit & writing.

Mielikki

When they told me who to put on the throne
I said, no, I will not be ruled.
The gods they showed me were tyrants
who displeased me with their judgments,
their injustice, yes, their cruelty.

Tough, I thought, and rugged.
Above the law am I —
an outlaw, a renegade
from the unhappy Kingdoms of Gods
who would cast me to hell and damnation —
there was no compassion, no love:
I was alone.

Running and running, cold and lonely,
hungry and tired — I kept my mouth shut
and my eyes hated everyone.

I was a hero, hungry and tough.
I was a hero, subsisting on crumbs.
Walking through cities, rubbing shoulders
with the people, the subjects, the soldiers,
all of them, of the enemy.

I scoffed at them,
and I knew I was dying.

But messengers sent from my own land, my homeland,
you sent them with messages in their hands
that I slowly trusted to touch me.

And homes where they brought me,
where I could not fall to harm —
where they expected nothing, only asked
if I might come home, to you.

Who are you?  the one who sits not on a throne
but runs hidden in the weather that surrounds me —
who follows but does not pursue me —
who knows always where I am when I
have shaken off everyone else —

who leaves secret love notes
in the heart of my deepest shame —
how do you find me when I, myself, am lost?

Today if I wake in wilderness,
in hot desolation, with cracked and dry lips,
I know you will give me comfort:
a cool stream from the dust,
the promise of peace
when I come home to you —
worn by travel, but wiser . . .
and always loved.

[June 11, 1984]

About this poem

This dates from the finding of my central “household god” — recounted in part in my 2006 post “A brief spiritual history” — the forest spirit Mielikki, who is metsolan emäntä: Mistress of Woodland. The name Mielikki combined the word mieli = heart, mind, consciousness, desire, etc., plus the suffix of endearment –kki.

Mielikki is also a central figure in my novel-in-progress Mistress of Woodland, which I’m finally back at work on.

[Good! We’ve been waiting! — M.]
[Yes.  Still waters run deep, but waters that are too still get stagnant. And grow algae. — V.]
[So says the Slackwater Man. — M.]
[When the helvetti you gonna write a poem about me? — L.]

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Is Alaska Governor Sean Parnell a Christian dominionist?

Posted on Thu, 31 March 2011 by Mel Green

Sean ParnellAnd just what is a “Christian dominionist”?  Well, it’s a lot like a Christianist.

Here’s Wikipedia:

In a politico-religious context, dominionism (also called subjectionism) is the tendency among some politically-active Christians, especially in the United States, to seek influence or control over secular civil government through political action. The goal is either a nation governed by Christians, or a nation governed by a conservative Christian understanding of biblical law.1

Lots of us Alaskans have been kinda wondering if Governor Sean Parnell — sometimes called “SP2” since he follows in the footsteps of former governor Sarah Palin — might be one. Especially after his February 11 appointment2 (currently awaiting confirmation) of Valdez  ultraconservative Don Haase of the ultraconservative Eagle Forum — an affiliation Haase neglected to include on his resume — to the Alaska Judicial Council.  As I wrote in a comment on the Anchorage Daily News story3 about the Alaska Senate Judiciary Committee’s questioning of Haase,

Putting people like Haase on the Judicial Council is part of Parnell’s participation with ChangePoint, Alaska Family Council, & related to try to overturn judicial independence in Alaska. Over the past couple years they’ve attempted to get rid of the Alaska Constitution’s provisions about the Judicial Council (via lawsuit in the case of Miller v. Carpeneti); they’ve tried to force judges up for retention to answer litmus test questions on abortion & LGBT rights; now they’re trying to stack the Judicial Council with members who will also work to keep nominees for the bench out based on those same litmus test questions.

That’s what Haase’s about, that’s what Gatto chair of House Judiciary is about, that’s what Sean Parnell is about. They don’t want _good_ judges: they want judges who will be in ideological agreement with them.3

Henkimaa readers may remember that I wrote quite a bit a couple years back  about the  Miller v. Carpeneti lawsuit, which sought to overturn provisions of the Alaska Constitution with regard to judicial selection and to undermine the checks and balances of our governmental system by placing more power into the hands of the executive branch at the expense of the judicial branch. See the post “Lawsuit asks feds to overrule Alaska Constitution” for a discussion of those issues.4

See also the post “Miller v. Carpeneti: The conservatives behind the attack on Alaska judicial independence and impartiality”5: One of the plaintiffs in that case is Carl Ekstrom who was a development director at the Anchorage megachurch ChangePoint.6 And guess what? — Sean Parnell also attends ChangePoint.7 Now, I don’t know that the church itself is attempting to promote this longterm campaign against judicial independence, but it’s where a lot of religious right activists rub shoulders, and events are frequently held there related to rightwing political issues, such as abortion.

Another plaintiff in Miller v. Carpeneti was Anchorage attorney Kenneth Kirk, an Anchorage attorney practicing in the areas of family law, estate planning, adoptions, and elder law. According to a 2009 Anchorage Press article by Scott Christiansen,

He’s also done some in-court activism on behalf of James Dobson’s Family Research Council, a major national policy arm of the conservative Christian movement. When the FRC wanted to file a friend-of-the-court brief in Alaska lawsuit over parental consent and minors choosing abortion, they called on Kirk.8

And so who else should show up on Sean Parnell’s February 11 appointment list but Kenneth Kirk?2 — in his case, the appointment was to the Alaska Public Offices Commission (APOC), the state agency charged with administering Alaska’s laws on campaign disclosure, financial disclosure of legislative and public officials, and lobbying regulation.  What a great place for an ideologically driven Republican Party of Alaska attorney9 to find himself.

Kirk was questioned on March 17 in the Alaska Senate State Affairs Committee about his views. Here’s an excerpt from the committee’s minutes:

SENATOR PASKVAN noted Mr. Kirk’s writing on the merit based system for the selection of judges sets out a dichotomy between liberal and conservative, and asked how he would apply that distinction in his work with APOC.

MR. KIRK replied that is his private citizen view. As a commissioner he would need to be more careful and considered in his decisions. He noted that he writes for the Bar Rag and his writings often try to shake things up; as an APOC commissioner he would be much more cautious.10

But can he be?

Questioning went into Mr. Kirk’s use of the word weapon in a 2007 article he wrote for Americans United for Life titled “Alaska: Conservative State, Liberal Judiciary” — essentially a report on the state of the Alaska judiciary regarding the issue of abortion from a “right to life” perspective.  Here’s the quote at issue:

In the past decade, the Alaska Supreme Court has gone far beyond the United States Supreme Court (“USSC”) in making it difficult for the legislature or governor to restrict or limit abortions, using the state constitution as its weapon.11

From the committee minutes:

SENATOR PASKVAN  noted the phrase  “using the  state constitution as  a   weapon”  in  Mr.   Kirk’s  writing  is  a   concern.  The constitution is more of a  standard than a weapon. That reference was made  to the Alaska  Supreme Court. The writing  was “Alaska: Conservative State, Liberal Judiciary.”

MR. KIRK said  he did that writing at the request of an advocacy organization. The  reference was to the Supreme Court trying to push a particular agenda.

SENATOR PASKVAN said he was focused  on the word “weapon” and why Mr. Kirk would use that term.

MR. KIRK said he doesn’t recall,  but his point was probably that the court  was  not  interpreting the  constitution  but  rather misusing it to push a particular agenda.10

But it could be just as easily argued that Mr. Kirk’s article was pushing an agenda and that the Alaska Supreme Court, charged with interpreting the Alaska Constitution, was doing just that.  Certainly the lawsuit in which Mr. Kirk joined in 2009, Miller v. Carpeneti, was squarely aimed at toppling the judicial independence — i.e., independence from political and ideological litmus tests — provided to the Alaska Supreme Court and the rest of the Alaska judiciary under the Alaska Constitution.

In any case, Mr. Kirk passed committee muster and his name will go forward to a joint meeting for confirmation to APOC.  Do we want him there?  If you don’t — call or write your legislators.

But Kenneth Kirk and Don Haase are Sean Parnell’s political appointees.  What about Sean Parnell himself?

As it happens, earlier today my colleague at Bent Alaska, E. Ross, posted a lengthy article about Parnell’s own activities indicating Christian dominionist leanings.  Her article, “Gov. Parnell, Choose Respect for All Alaskans,” calls Gov. Parnell out about the contradictions inherent in his “Choose Respect” campaign against sexual assault and domestic violence, in which he “calls for a cultural shift…towards honor and respect for all Alaskans” even as he shows anything but respect for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans Alaskans and our families.12 The article is worth quoting at length:

Last week, the state senate questioned Don Haase, recent president of the anti-gay Eagle Forum and Parnell’s choice for the panel that nominates state judges. Haase kept off his resume his leadership role in the extreme conservative group, but admitted that he thought sex outside of marriage should be illegal, saying, “I think that would be up to the voters… I can see legitimate reasons to push that as a crime.”

(The judicial panel only has three members of the public, and already has one far right member: Sarah Palin appointed Kathleen Tompkins-Miller, wife of tea party Senate candidate Joe Miller, to the council in 2009.)

Let’s put the pieces together on Don Haase – the person Sean Parnell wants to pick our state judges – and LGBT Alaskans: Leader of the Eagle Forum which pushes a strong anti-gay agenda, worked against the effort to allow same sex marriages in Alaska, worked to take away domestic partnership benefits for same sex partners of state employees, worked against hate crimes protections and non-discrimination laws, and clearly does not support even civil unions. So sex outside of marriage is a crime, and gay and lesbian couples must not be allowed to get married, therefore… consensual sex between two adults of the same gender should be illegal.

This is not the way to choose respect for all Alaskans.

Last year, Parnell flew to Colorado on state money to spend the day with Focus on the Family.13 He told them about his Choose Respect project and other ideas for Alaska. Why? He doesn’t need their approval to start a sexual assault and child abuse prevention program in Alaska. What would a corporation that sells harmful pray-away-the-gay workshops tell the governor of another state about his domestic violence project?

The hate watch site Good As You writes:

“Focus on the Family dedicates much time to keeping same-sex couples away from adoption, foster care, and a whole host of protections that strengthen LGBT families. And of course they work every day to deny a fair shake to gay kids and/or the kids of gay parents… [They] talk only about the kind of ‘strong family environment’ that’s defined by evangelism and heterosexuality.”

This is not the way to choose respect for all Alaskans.…

OK, Gov. Parnell. Put your money where your mouth is. Tell ALL Alaskans who have been abused, including LGBT Alaskans, that you support us and we are not alone. Show all Alaskans, including LGBT Alaskans and those who abuse us, that together we can break the silence and choose respect. Walk the talk: Be a role model for how to choose respect by choosing leaders who respect all Alaskans. Call for a cultural shift towards honor and respect for all Alaskans and encourage the legislature to pass Hate Crimes and non-discrimination bills that include sexual orientation and gender identity. Or start small and proclaim June 2011 as LGBT Pride Month in Alaska. Do it.

Stand at the point of the spear and choose respect for all Alaskans. And mean it.12

But something tells me… he won’t. I think we’d be fairly safe to say that Parnell is a Christianist & dominionist, much like Sarah Palin — except not quite so noisy about it. Which actually makes him more effective at it.

Looking forward to a rightwing Alaska theocracy? No?  Then what will you do about it?

References

  1. “Dominionism.” Article on Wikepedia.
  2. 11 Feb 2011. “Governor Delivers Appointments to Legislature” (press release) (Office of Governor Sean Parnell).
  3. 24 Mar 2011. “Sex outside marriage should be illegal, says Parnell nominee: Don Haase was active for years as advocate for socially conservative issues” by Richard Mauer (Anchorage Daily News). See also reader comments.
  4. 8/27/09. “Lawsuit asks feds to overrule Alaska Constitution” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
  5. 11 Sep 2009. “Miller v. Carpeneti: The conservatives behind the attack on Alaska judicial independence and impartiality” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
  6. Google search on “changepoint” + “carl ekstrom.”
  7. Google search on “changepoint” + “sean parnell.”
  8. 9/2/09. “Battle for the bench – Why do conservatives want to change the way Alaska picks its judges?” by Scott Christiansen (Anchorage Press).
  9. 20 Oct 2010. “Alaska Supreme Court hears arguments on write-in lists” by Joshua Saul (Alaska Dispatch).
  10. 17 Mar 2011. Minutes of the Alaska Senate State Affairs Committee. (Alaska State Legislature).
  11. “Alaska: Conservative State, Liberal Judiciary” by Kenneth Kirk (Americans United for Life, 2007).
  12. 31 Mar 2011. “Gov. Parnell, Choose Respect for All Alaskans” by E. Ross (Bent Alaska).
  13. 10 Jun 2010. “Alaska pays for Parnell’s date with Colorado homophobes” by E. Ross (Bent Alaska).
Posted in Alaska politics | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

It Gets Better, the book: A “message in a bottle” to LGBT youth

Posted on Tue, 29 March 2011 by Mel Green

Posted originally at Bent Alaska

Summer 1978, Columbia Falls, Montana. I was 19 years old, back at home after my freshman year in college, working at the local aluminum reduction plant to earn money toward the following year’s tuition — and trying to figure out if I really was, as I had started figuring out back at college, a lesbian. I had no one to talk with about it — no friends I could trust with this stuff…and family? — family was even scarier. Nowhere to get any information, either — there were no blogs, no YouTube, no Internet at all.

"Lesbian/Woman" by Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon I did, finally, locate in a used bookstore in Kalispell (our county seat) a copy of the feminist anthology Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), which included two essays by lesbians. One of them was by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, founders of the first lesbian rights organization in the U.S., Daughters of Bilitis, and authors of the landmark book Lesbian/Woman (1972). I can’t remember who wrote the other one.

Those two essays were all the information I had — that, and the information from my own heart — upon which to base the decision of whether to accept myself as a lesbian or not.

But they made a difference, maybe even the difference that helped keep me from giving up. While I didn’t think of it at the time, these women — Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon, and the author whose name I don’t remember — were lesbian elders, teaching me, a lesbian youth, that it was okay to be me, okay for me to love myself, and that as hard as things were for me at the time, they would get better. And they did.

Fast forward to September 2010 and the birth of the It Gets Better Project. We wrote about it then: after a rash of suicides by gay kids who had been bullied and harassed by their peers, Savage Love columnist Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller made a YouTube video to let LGBT kids know that however tough their teenage years, please hold on: it will get better. Two months later, there were over 10,000 videos giving kids that message, and the numbers continue to grow.

It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth LivingThing is, not every kid has access to YouTube. And so Dan Savage and Terry Miller have now compiled a book: about 100 selected accounts from the It Gets Better Project, now in print as It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living, published just last week. I downloaded a copy into my Kindle for iPhone app last Thursday.

In his introduction to the book, Dan Savage eloquently expresses the frustration a lot of us LGBT adults have had as we were forced to stand idly by while homophobic parents, ministers, teachers, and kids battered the hell out of the bodies and spirits of LGBT youth:

The culture used to offer this deal to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people: You’re ours to torture until you’re eighteen. You will be bullied and tormented at school, at home, at church — until you’re eighteen. Then, you can do what you want. You can come out, you can move away, and maybe, if the damage we’ve done isn’t too severe, you can recover and build a life for yourself. There’s just one thing you can’t do after you turn eighteen: You can’t talk to the kids we’re still torturing, the LGBT teenagers being assaulted emotionally, physically, and spiritually in the same cities, schools, and churches you escaped from. And if you do attempt to talk to the kids we’re still torturing, we’ll impugn your motives, we’ll accuse you of being a pedophile or pederast, we’ll claim you’re trying to recruit children into “the gay lifestyle.”

That was the old order and it fell apart when the It Gets Better Project went viral. Suddenly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender adults all over the world — all over the world — were speaking to LGBT youth. We weren’t waiting for permission anymore. We found our voices.

The project, of course, cannot solve all the problems of anti-LGBT bullying in school — much less the self-hatred fostered by homophobic preachers and their believers who are, all too often, the family members and “friends” of trans, bi, gay, and lesbian kids. Dan Savage acknowledged as much in his introduction, and also in an interview last week with the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

There are kids in situations of extreme isolation, where all we can do is put the message in a bottle and throw it to the sea and give them hope for the future.

But sometimes that message in a bottle makes all the difference — as it did for me. And so this story, which Savage told to NPR’s Terri Gross last week on “Fresh Air” —

Forty percent of homeless teenagers are LGBT kids who were thrown out after they came out or were outed. And you know, a huge problem, something that makes the bullying of gay youth very different from the bullying of other kids – and other kids are bullied – is that often the families are active participants in the bullying.

You know, LGBT kids are four times likelier to attempt suicide. If their families reject them or are hostile, they’re eight times likelier. And this girl wrote to say that she’s 15, she tried to come out. Her parents freaked out, threatened to throw her out of the house, threatened to not let her see her siblings anymore, not pay for her education.

And so she went back in the closet and told them that she made a mistake, that she was just a tomboy and was confused and thought that meant she had to be a lesbian when she grew up but that she was wrong.

And she wrote me to tell me that she was watching the videos, and they were really helping her be strong and filling her with hope that her family could come around, because a lot of the videos, and now the essays in the book, are by people who had – whose families had similar reactions and then came around and are now supportive.

And she wrote to tell me that the videos were keeping her sane and she was watching them in her room at night, under the covers, on her iPad. And so that one email for me really captures the reach and power of this project, that LGBT adults are able to talk to this girl and give her hope for her future and for her family, give her hope that her family will heal, and talk to her whether her parents want us to or not.

Buy the book: for yourself, for your kids’ school library, for your church or other faith organization. You can also contribute to the It Gets Better Project’s effort to get copies of the book into every high school library in the country.

Here’s Dan Savage and Terry Miller’s video about the book:

P.S. I’m happy to say that my family turned out to be not quite as scary as I thought they were in the summer of 1978. I love them all.

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The Daily Tweets 2011-03-22: How Anakin became a Jedi

Posted on Wed, 23 March 2011 by Mel Green

Star Wars Episode 1: Phantom Menace (poster)Good jokes, bad jokes… who cares? So long as they gain a good laugh or a good groan, I’m happy.

Tweet 1:

  • Stay tuned for my Star Wars Episode 1 joke, coming up next: #fb#

For Tweet 2, you’ll need to know what a midichlorian is.

  • How do parents in the Galactic Republic increase their chances of having Jedi offspring? They midichlorinate their gene pools. #fb#

Imagine my pleasure when a friend on the list where I first posted this joke replied,

“That’s truly awful — I must pass it along. My son also groaned.”

As will we, when we watch the full movie again sometime early next year.  Yes, there are plans afoot for a Twitter livesnark of Star Wars Episode 1 in… er… honor? celebration?… uh… of next February’s release of Phantom Menace 3-D.  My co-snarker-in-chief pronounced that 2D was sufficient for a good livesnark, so we’ll be doing it in advance of the release, just to remind people why they might not want to spend their precious dollars to see Jar Jar Binks in 3D. )

Meantime, for your listening pleasure: the Midichlorian Rhapsody.

See previous livesnarks:

Posted in The Daily Tweets | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Good, evil, & great waves of god

Posted on Thu, 17 March 2011 by Mel Green

Behind the Great Wave at Kanagawa" (神奈川沖波裏) by Hokusai

A couple of days ago Andrew Sullivan highlighted a post by former Anglican priest Mark Vernon, in his blog “Philosophy and Life.”  Vernon’s post which he called “The great waves of Japan”, is worth quoting in full:

I was hearing about the famous painting, The Great Wave of Kanagawa, by Hokusai. It captures something of the horror of what’s fallen northern Japan, with its image of the fishermen dwarfed by the majestic, indifferent tower of water.

It’s a religious image, representing the very different approach that Shintoism has towards nature, compared with Christianity. In Christianity, human beings are at the centre of nature: creation is for humanity, along with other creatures, and it’s humanity’s task to care for it. Hence, in part, the offence we feel when nature turns against us.

In Shintoism, nature is recognised as infinitely more powerful than humankind — as in the wave — and that humankind is in nature with the permission of the gods but with no particular concern from the gods. Shinto rituals show respect for the gods of nature, befriending the enormity of the forces, if you like. But, apparently, there won’t be much of the moral affront at what’s happened — the problem of evil — from the Japanese perspective.

Vernon explained further in response to a commenter’s question,

The problem of evil arises from the Christian doctrine that an all-powerful and good God made the world for us, in some sense, though that world is full of horrors. How come? In the Shinto cosmology, though, the gods are not anthropocentric with their attention, so Shintoism teaches, as I understand it, that one should expect evil from nature quite as much as good.

Good and evil — that’s the question that theologians call theodicy (not to be confused with Homer’s masterpiece The Odyssey, though they’re pronounced much the same).  Theodicy comes from the Greek, theos “god” + dike “justice” (Dikē was the Greek goddess of moral justice), & has to do with trying to reconcile a benevolent all-powerful God (especially as understood in Christianity & other monotheistic religions like Judaism & Islam) with the existence of evil.  Or with, simply, the fact that bad things happen to good people — as happened, & is happening, to the people of Japan in the aftermath of last week’s devastating earthquake & tsunami.

I’ve written on this blog about theodicy before — most extensively just a little over a year ago, after Christianist lackwit Pat Robertson blamed the January 2010 Haiti earthquake on Haitians.

And sure enough, another lackwit, this time Glenn Beck of Fox News, has made a similar suggestion about the Japan quake.  So has South Korean pastor David Yonggi Cho of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest Christian church in the world.  Meanwhile, a longtime Internet troll who posed as an extreme Christianist pulled her YouTube account after public outrage over a video she posted last Monday praising God for killing the “atheist” victims of the quake. Her authenticity had apparently long been debated; but, strikingly, a lot of people believed she was for real.  After all, many Christianists are routinely just as offensive, even as they earnestly call upon others to worship a god whose “acts of god” they attribute to their god’s own enforcement of ideological purity.

(It sure as hell ain’t to enforce moral purity that a god would slaughter innocents by the thousands.)

(Reminder: Christian and Christianist — not the same thing.  A Christian is a follower of the Christian faith, whatever politics she or he might follow — conservative, moderate, liberal, independent.  A Christianist is one whose supposed Christianity has become, in the words of Andrew Sullivan, “ideology, politics, an ism…. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.”)

But back to what Vernon said about Shintoism:

In the Shinto cosmology, though, the gods are not anthropocentric with their attention, so Shintoism teaches, as I understand it, that one should expect evil from nature quite as much as good.

(I don’t think that a natural event like an earthquake or tsunami has a moral dimension such as evil per se; but beyond that quibble) … there’s a book of the Bible that teaches much the same: the Book of Job.  As Stephen Mitchell writes in the introduction to his 1992 translation of the Book of Job regarding Job and his friends, who are  “comforting” Job after he’s lost nearly everything, including all his children:

The friends and Job all agree that God is wise and can see into the hearts of men.  He is not the kind of character who would allow a good man to be tortured because of a bet; nor is he a well-intentioned bungler.  Given this premise, they construct opposite syllogisms.  The friends: Suffering comes from God.  God is just.  Therefore Job is guilty. Job: Suffering comes from God. I am innocent. Therefore God is unjust.  A third possibility is not even thinkable: Suffering comes from God.  God is just.  Job is innocent. (No therefore.)

And later,

[Job] wants to die; he wants to prove that he is innocent; he wants to shake his fist at God for leaving the world in such a wretched shambles. God is his enemy; God has made a terrible mistake; God has forgotten him; or doesn’t care; God will surely defend him, against God. His question, the harrowing question of someone who has only heard of God, is “Why me?” There is no answer, because it is the wrong question.

The harrowing question of someone who has only heard of God.  But then the Voice from the Whirlwind comes, and Job not only hears but actually sees:

The storm rumbled and thundered.  The wind tore at my clothing
and took my breath.  I could not stand or speak,
and she had not the breath to make a curse.
Here was the justice of the Unnameable!
We would be smitten by that self-same howling wind
that had poured from the desert like a band of outlaws
to destroy my sons and murder my daughters.

And then was stillness, as death, a steep silence.
And look! we raised our eyes to the maelstrom’s clouded throat,
dizzied.  Spinning vapors formed and broke away and blew;
lightning flashed in the turbulent dark belly of the wind.
I was dust to be blown by that wind  but was not blown.
I stood under the very eye of the Unnameable.  And within me grew a stillness.

(from my poem “Job 42.13”)

It’s hard to put into words what Job’s experience of the Unnameable was, that we so often name “God” — and which I name as god with a lower case g, the very substance & being & energy of which the universe & everything in it has its being.  The poet of Job did a damn good job, nonetheless, of pointing to what that wordless and awesome and terrifying and profound experience was.

But none of it has a damn thing to do with human understandings of justice and injustice, of good and evil.  It just is what it is.  Sometimes bad things happen to good people. In hopes of being good people ourselves, let’s help those who need our help.

* * *

“Behind the Great Wave at Kanagawa” (神奈川沖波裏) by Hokusai (1760–1849) is actually not a painting, but rather a color woodcut.  It’s one of the series “36 Views of Mount Fuji.”  I come by the reproduction of it at the head of this post by way of Wikimedia Commons.  The Wikimedia contributor comments, “Although it is often used in tsunami literature, there is no reason to suspect that Hokusai intended it to be interpreted in that way. The waves in this work are sometimes mistakenly referred to as tsunami (津波), but they are more accurately called okinami (沖波), great off-shore waves.” M.J.  a commenter on Vernon’s blog post, shared the explanation given him/her by a docent at the Smithsonian Sackler Gallery during a Hokusai exhibit there:

All the diagonal lines and dots represent movement, things not always remaining the same. Some of Hokusai’s paintings, such as this one, depict scary moments like this big storm. You can see the ends of the waves looking almost like claws, which are scary but also symbolize our wishing to hang on to things the way they are, not wanting things to change. Our wish for things to remain the same makes the situation look worse than it really is.

When you look closely at this picture, the waves don’t don’t look so scary and are actually quite beautiful…. In this painting, you can see people in boats huddled together and crouching down. This is not because they’re scared but because they know how they should position themselves to take on this challenge. Actually, they seem to be in reverence of the big waves. In the midst and at the end of this picture is Mt. Fuji, representing calm at the end of the storm.

A good meaning; and also, I think, one which ties well with the peace, even joy, of Job by the end of the book that bears his name.  The end of my poem “Job 42.13” —

There are tears now in her eyes as she watches them play —
yes, seven sons, three daughters — as before.
I rejoice in them, but also grieve for our windlost children —
the only love I gave them was to make burnt offerings
against sins I feared lay hidden in their unknown hearts.

But listen! they laugh! she laughs!  And I laugh, too.

May it be so also for the survivors of Japan.

* * *

The Book of Job is obviously important to me — my favorite of all the books of the Bible. But Hokusai’s Great Wave has also been important to me, ever since I got it engraved in my skin in December 1983.

Tattoo

Due to the process used by the tattoo artist — Larry Allen of Anchorage Tattoo Studio —my tatt is a mirror image of Hokusai’s original.

At the time it was done, I was still deeply enmeshed in my pre-aha period of self-hatred and almost continual despair.  But I had come across to a reference somewhere to the Chinese ideogram that we translate as crisis.  According to my source (which may or may not be correct), the Chinese character literally meant opportunity rides a dangerous wind.

Or something to that effect.  That’s, at least, how I wrote it in a poem the following year, after the aha.  And there is Hokusai as well, his Great Wave etched on my arm, linked to the meaning (putative or not) of that Chinese character —

On my arm, tattooed, is the large wave, the boats,
the mountain — my life, crisis on crisis:
opportunity rides on the dangerous wind.

It’s wonderful then to read what the commenter on Vernon’s post said about Mt. Fuji in Hokusai’s woodcut:

In the midst and at the end of this picture is Mt. Fuji, representing calm at the end of the storm.

Or the Chugach Mountains, for me —

Day followed day, the old stream of time,
just the same as before.
But each day I saw the mountains change —
one day growing gold in the afternoon sun —
one day dusted white by the season’s first snow —
one day touched by clouds as soft as white roses —
I could see them and breathe them and touch them and feel them.
Each day I saw the mountains change —

so did change find me.

Chugach Mountains

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Help John Aronno of Alaska Commons go to Netroots Nation

Posted on Thu, 10 March 2011 by Mel Green

I was delighted to learn that John had applied for the scholarship for Netroots Nation 2011; & I’m even more delighted to support his candidacy — both as a progressive blogger per se, and as a tremendous ally to LGBT Alaskans. Please vote for him!

Help John Aronno go to Netroots Nation!

Click through to help John go to Netroots Nation!

Netroots Nation is an annual conference dedicated to providing progressive activists and candidates for office a forum to strengthen the online community and grow the progressive movement. This year’s conferences will be held June 16–19 in Minneapolis.

John Aronno of Alaska Commons wants to go; and to that end he’s applied for one of the scholarships offered by Democracy for America and America’s Voice to help him get there.  To get it, he needs your help! — just follow the link the the Democracy for America website, sign up (if you don’t already have an account), & vote!

I was asked on my Facebook wall why there were no LGBT candidates from Alaska for the Netroots scholarship.  Here’s why: because none of us applied for it.  In fact, I ran into Shannyn Moore at the Bear Tooth a few weeks ago and she suggested that I apply, but since I’m trying to steer myself toward my writing — which feeds my spirit in a way that political blogging does not — I didn’t actually want to go to Netroots Nation.  But even if I had applied, why, it’s always possible to send two people, not just one.  If I’m not mistaken, Netroots scholarships were awarded last year to both Shannyn Moore & to Jeanne Devon of The Mudflats.  (Here’s Jeanne’s report on Netroots 2010.)

Three bloggers all in a row

Three bloggers all in a row: John, Heather, and me at the Anchorage Assembly on tha night the Anchorage equal rights ordinance (AO-64) passed, 11 Aug 2009. (AO-64 was vetoed a few days later by Mayor Dan Sullivan.)

In any case, I was delighted to learn that John had applied for the scholarship; & I’m even more delighted to support his candidacy for a scholarship — both as a progressive blogger per se, and as a tremendous ally to LGBT Alaskans.  I first met John in the trenches of the fight for the Anchorage equal rights ordinance, AO 64, in 2009, along with his then fiancee, now wife Heather.  We all three of us sat side-by-side at most of those horrendous public testimony sessions in the Anchorage Assembly, all three of us blogging about it. It’s safe to say that John and Heather kept kept me sane throughout that Summer of Hate.

Masingka Dancers & Singers

John and Heather, with Diane Benson, join in dancing with the Masignka Yup'ik dance group at the True Diversity Dinner in Anchorage, 25 Sep 2009.

It was also John and Heather who did more than anyone to put together the True Diversity dinner in September 2009 as an alternative to Mayor Dan Sullivan’s hypocrisy-in-action “Unity Dinner” in the aftermath of Sullivan’s veto of the ordinance.  The event was a tremendous success, drawing a large cross-section of the Alaska progressive community in support of diversity and LGBT equality — including several Assembly members, candidates for statewide offices, and Senator Mark Begich.

Since then John has gone on to take a vigorous role in progressive politics in Anchorage as both an activist and a commentator on radio and other local media and blogs.  He was recipient of the 2010 Alaska Press Association’s Suzan Nightengale Award for Best Columnist in a small paper for his work with University of Alaska Anchorage’s The Northern Light, is a former radio talk show host of Studio 1080 on Alaska’s Voice: KUDO 1080 AM (before it got bought out by Fox); a guest host on the Shannyn Moore Show on KOAN 1020 AM; and is a contributor to the Anchorage Press, the Alaska Dispatch (be sure to read his commentary on anti-LGBT bigotry there), and Alaska’s LGBT blog Bent Alaska.  On Alaska Commons, he and Heather are currently keeping Anchorage voters informed on the candidates and issues facing us when we go to the polls in the Municipality of Anchorage elections next month.  They testified before the University of Alaska Board of Regents to add sexual orientation to the university’s nondiscrimination policy, and continue to write about issues important to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans Alaskans, including the Anchorage LGBT Discrimination Survey, California’s Prop 8, the Alaska Hate Crimes bill (SB 11), and the homophobic rantings of Anchorage Baptist Temple preacher Jerry Prevo.

I am so pleased to have John as my friend and ally, & I feel privileged to support John for this scholarship. I hope you will too.

(I’m also really complimented that John’s Netroots scholarship application lists my blog Henkimaa as one of the two blogs — the other being The Mudflats — that he uses the most.)

John Aronno of Alaska Commons

John at the Anchorage PrideFest 2010 picnic, 26 Jun 2010.

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Harm at the center

Posted on Wed, 9 March 2011 by Mel Green

It's all just an act (018/365)

Crossposted at Bent Alaska

A couple of years ago, Bent Alaska announced a LGBTQ panel at University of Alaska Anchorage, an institution of which I am both an employee & an alumna.  So on April 1, 2009, I attended the panel which held in the Consortium Library just upstairs from my department.  After I got home that night, I even started drafting a blog post about it.  Then I forgot all about it…until I discovered it hidden away amongst my old drafts.

This post is that post, completed.

Some of the discussion at that two-years-ago panel revolved around improving the kind of support that LGBTQ students, faculty, & staff receive at UAA, whether through the existing student organization The Family, or institutionally through expanding the Women’s Studies Program (which sponsored the event) to be a Women’s and Gender Studies Program; through other institutional means at UAA or the University of Alaska statewide, such as a nondiscrimination policy; or through strengthening the connections between the university LGBTQ & the larger Anchorage LGBTQ community, including ally organizations like Anchorage PFLAG.

(Just a few weeks ago, the UA Board of Regents finally passed a policy on February 18, 2011 which added sexual orientation to the University of Alaska’s nondiscrimination policy.  It is as yet unclear whether the Regents intend this policy to also cover gender identity/expression.)

But there was also a lot of discussion about the whole gender identity/expression and sexual orientation thing, and how we had variously experienced it. We had gay folks, lesbian folks,  male-to-female and female-to-male transfolk, a Samoan fa’afafine alum, a PFLAG mother of a lesbian, another mother of a daughter who might actually be her son (i.e., trans).  We had students, a couple of staff members including me, a faculty member, and a number of people from the community.  We had various ages from college student age all the way to people in their 50s and 60s.

What really stuck out for me was the common experience most of us (all except the “allies”) had of pushing through to be ourselves in the face of huge pressure to conform to other people’s expectations about how we should dress, how we should act, who we should love, how we should be defined in arbitrary cultural ways by the genitals we were born with. How painful it was to not be accepted simply for who we were and are.

Well, sure— I’ve lived through plenty of that myself. It’s just (usually) not quite so visceral to me anymore because it’s been many years since I came out, and I’ve been openly lesbian for most of that time.

But damned if I don’t remember the pressure to wear dresses that I never felt comfortable in, to be “feminine.” Or the fear I felt as a sophomore in college when an acquaintance wanted to talk with me about being lesbian and I frantically counted the very few friends who knew about me — who told her?

As I wrote in another post in 2009, shortly after the veto of the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO-64, about coming out when I was in college,

It was scary, it was painful, & it was a slow long job to learn who I could or could not trust with this important aspect of who I am.  And as hateful as the “Truth is Not Hate” hate speech that we heard constantly spewed from the mouths of red-shirted ordinance opponents over the course of the summer, the sentiments they expressed were not so different from the conventional wisdom of the majority of my peers in the East Coast women’s liberal arts college I attended from 1977 to 1981. Yes: the same college that Hillary Rodham Clinton attended, a supposed bastion of liberalism.

Sitting in that meeting, I was sent back into those memories, and began to feel worse.  In April 2009, when I started writing this post, I was just coming out of a lengthy period in the cave — the cave being my name for one of the varieties of “depression” (or sometimes plain old despair) I sometimes experience.  The cave is probably why I didn’t finish the post at the time: I was afraid I’d go back into it.  I was coming face to face, for the first time in a long time, with how deeply I was scarred by all that shit of a lifetime in homophobia-land, all the fear and distrust I had for the people around me simply because of who and what I was.

As far as I’ve come along from the all of that, I still have the scars. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve struggled with despair/depression off & on all my adult life — actually, dating back to my last couple of years of high school. For almost as long, I’ve tried to figure out what it was about, where it came from. There are other strands in my background that I can point to — most prominently, the effect on my mother, and through her me, of her having grown up with an alcoholic father — but the effect of growing up in a society that actively hated my difference, well… its hard to measure exactly.  But it’s there.

And it goes far beyond me.  How many friends have I had who’ve suffered similarly because the church, or their family, or their friends, or some combination of all of the above and then some, has been unable or unwilling to accept them on their own terms?

Bob, a coparticipant of mine in a high school enrichment program at University of Wyoming who, at age 17,  jumped to his death from the 9th floor of White Hall, after having reportedly being harassed by other participants about being a “faggot.” My friend in college who was raped after a male visitor to our campus learned she was a lesbian.  My friend up here in Alaska who at age 20 was gang-raped by eight men in his Army unit, then further raped with a broken bottle, for no other reason than that he was gay. Other friends and acquaintances who have gotten lost in drugs or booze, like my namesake Melissa who died of a heroin overdose in July 1983 just a few months after I arrived in Alaska.  Other friends or acquaintances who have attempted, or succeeded with, suicide — at least two women in the Anchorage lesbian community that I can think of off the top of my head, and undoubtedly more.  Other people I never knew but might have, had they not been murdered, like Raymond Barker, murdered by Charles Cole and Matthew Decker in April 1985; Oscar Jackson, murdered by William M. Justice in December 1984; or Peter Dispirito, murdered in August 1974 by Gary Lee Starbard, who received a sentence of just one year for — in the judge’s words — the “unfortunate accident — incident” that led to his victim’s death. (Dispirito is still remembered through a public service award bestowed annually by the Imperial Court of All Alaska.)  By circumstance, this post follows the publication last night on Bent Alaska of Johnathan Jones’ post on the death of his foster sister by suicide. I share, we all share, his grief.

Self-hatred: it’s harm at the very center of us.

And it doesn’t only enter us due to overt acts of hatred against us, or even from hatred at all. I’d say in fact that the most common harm any human faces — the one that most harmed me — come from people who care about us. People who, well-intended, attempt to pressure and coerce us to behave according to arbitrary standards, rather than according to our integrity, our selfhoods as human beings. Strip away all the warnings about God’s commandments or What will Grandma and Grandpa, our friends, the neighbors, your schoolmates, the people at church think? — strip way all the reassurances that We’re saying this because we love you and It’s in your best interests: in the final analysis, it’s the harm that says: Your own account of yourself is meaningless; your feelings don’t count; you don’t count.

Who does not despair, violated in that way in the very core of who we are?

But if the harm is at our center, then so is the cure. The foundational step towards finding a way for myself that didn’t involve killing myself or hating myself was coming out and accepting and loving myself as a lesbian. I was 19 when I did that, a sophomore at Wellesley College.  It took me a few years after that, but that first foundation ultimately gave me the strength to give up self-hatred altogether.

Love others as you love yourself.  But first: love yourself.  Trust yourself.  Respect yourself. Walk easy in your skin. Let no one convince you to do otherwise.

Rock in balance

Posted in depression, Itse, LGBTQA | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments