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Please – call the White House and Congress and tell them that you support good gun legislation. We have to flood them with our support, and we have to do it right now. Please.
White House: 202-456-1111
US Representatives & Senators: 202-224-3121
All posts in category Gratitude
Gratitude and Sandy.
A random and completely incomplete list of things for which I’ve found myself suddenly, heartpoundingly grateful, in the wake of Superstorm Sandy (which, let’s not forget, was all of eleven days ago):
- The chance to have a fight with my 9 year old daughter about what jacket she should wear.
- The temperature of my shower water.
- The ability to get online and have Peapod deliver boxes of food to my front door.
- The fact of my front door.
- The access of everyone in my family to the various medications we take.
- Holding my children in my arms.
- The opportunity to run something over to the middle school because my 13 year old boy irritated the crap out of me by forgetting it.
- My thermostat.
- My family photo albums, dry, complete, and all in one place.
- A tank of gas.
It has been easy, in this week of nail-biting elections and joyous outcome to forget that tens of thousands of American citizens are currently living under conditions that are third-world in nature, without any of the coping skills, mechanisms, or networks that third-world citizens must necessarily develop to survive. It’s always awful to have your access to food and clean water and mobility washed away — there’s something particularly perverse to having it happen when you live 20 floors up, a circumstance only made possible by the assumption that all of that can never happen.
I’ve made donations to the Red Cross, have made an appointment to give blood, and I have urged others to do the same. Out here in the middle of the country, I feel like it’s just about the best I can do — but please note that there is a lively conversation going on in the comments of yesterday’s open thread, offering information from the ground, and alternative outlets for help (thank you Neocortex, Nora Munro, and watson42).
I remain very, very worried for the individual people still living in such awful want, and about the implications for New York City and the rest of the country going forward. I think we have a long way to go before we really understand the full impact of this storm (and the followup northeaster), and I fear it’s going to be worse than we may have even feared.
If you can help, please do. In the meantime, I’ll be over here counting my blessings.
Shabbat shalom to all.
UPDATE: The Rumpus has just posted a Hurricane Sandy Relief Effort Roundup which folks might also find helpful.
Posted by emilylhauser on November 9, 2012
http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/gratitude-and-sandy/
Before the tide goes back out.
I gave myself today.
Now, it could be argued that on five bad hours of sleep, a raging morning headache, a cold all day long, and sheer giddiness over and above it all, I wasn’t good for much anyway, but at some point in the late morning, I came to understand that I was allowing myself one day to just enjoy the election results. I wouldn’t read anything infuriating, I wouldn’t think about my fears for the second term (fears for PBO’s life, and/or fears about what PBO will or will not achieve), I wouldn’t do almost anything but bask in the giddiness.
And before that day ends — before I get up tomorrow and have to write about matters Israel/Palestine and the President’s policies re: same, and I have to consider the extent of the hatred reserved for the man we just re-elected, and I have to be reminded of just how ugly budget discussions are — I want to get down how this feels, today. How it felt last night.
The anxiety I have felt over the past 10 days or so was entirely (and literally) unfamiliar to me. I’m just not built like that — I worry, sure, and can get pretty despairing given half a chance (or 25 years of peace advocacy), but the kind of paralyzing, hair-trigger emotionality soaked with an entirely amorphous fear and general sense of nausea? I don’t do that. But I sure did it, off and on, over the past 10 days. It was the chaos factor, the simple fact that America’s pre-election reality had been shaken hard by random weather and entirely unrandom voter manipulation, that threw me off so badly. I had been confident of an Obama win (though I thought it would be narrower than it ultimately was), but the chaos opened the door in my little head to the other possibility, and the sheer mean, nasty implications of that just overwhelmed me. I didn’t think Obama was going to lose – but what if he did?
So when the election was called, at about 10:10 pm CST, I thundered up the stairs to tell my just-barely-asleep boy, thundered back down, and burst into near-hysterical sobs. Shaking, weeping, falling into my husband’s arms, who was doing his own (much less extreme) version of same. The relief was not just “palpable” — it was a living, breathing thing that had entered our home and shed the light of grace on our worst fears.
And then, as the night rolled along, all the other victories for common sense and human compassion and fact over reality-bending were just one wave of joy after another. Tears continued to come, initially of the same back-from-the-brink, near-hysterical relief quality, but eventually of my rather more standard weepy-Wanda-OMG-the-wonder-of-it-all! variety, and that, too felt like a blessing (though all that crying may very well explain the morning’s headache).
This feels like not just a victory for President Obama; not just a victory for the party with which I have identified ideologically my entire life; not just a victory for policies that I believe to be good. This feels like a vindication of the huge step we took as a nation four years ago when we elected an African American in the first place; like a defense and a deepening of a crucial policy legacy that would have crumbled had Obama lost; and above all, like a statement that despite everything, despite all that we do wrong and all the myriad ways in which Americans are as stupidly human as anyone else — our humanity also contains a striving for justice and an attachment to bettering the world as it actually is. That we are not defined by people like Karl Rove and Sheldon Adelson and Joe Walsh and Mitt Romney, that we can look at their craven, manipulative mendacity and call it what it is — and push back. Reject it. Claim instead faith and hard work and mutual respect. A victory for government of the people, by the people, for the people over the forces of big money and appalling hubris.
This feels like hope.
I’ll get angry or frightened or sad, or all three, tomorrow (or the day after), I know. Not only is it the lot of the life-long activist, it’s kind of part and parcel of democracy.
But today, tonight, right now: I am grinning. I am hopeful. I am thrilled.
And tonight I sleep all the sleeps, and tomorrow I arise, girded and ready to face the dragons.
Posted by emilylhauser on November 7, 2012
http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/before-the-tide-goes-back-out/
It’s a new day….
This, too:
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I woke up this morning
Feeling alright
I’ve been fightin’ for tomorrow
All my life
h/t my friend Chris Savage, aka Eclectablog, who wrote a great little post about the results of the election and in particular the defeat of Michigan’s heinous and deeply undemocratic Emergency Manager law, a law which Chris has advocated tirelessly against.
Posted by emilylhauser on November 7, 2012
http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/its-a-new-day/
A house – in memory.
Two years ago today, a beloved and wonderful man died. I wrote this for him and his daughter, my oldest friend in the world, and I post it again today in his memory. I miss his laugh, the laugh that would fill rooms and call over strangers. I miss his words, his stream, his rushing river of words. I miss his whistle. I miss him. He didn’t believe in heaven, but I hope that he has found whatever rest any of us may find after this world.
There’s this house.
It’s at the bottom of a hill, to the left and in a small valley, as you drive north on Wisconsin State Highway 23. If you come over the hill at night, you’ll see the lights in the windows, an amber glow under more stars than you’ll ever see in a Chicago sky.
The house is small. The kitchen floor is rough and unfinished, the wallpaper torn here and there. There’s a terrible Christmas clock hung on one wall because it met a need and now serves to amuse. The house smells of wood stove heat and cooking, and of the earth that washes off vegetables fresh in from the fields.
The fields belong to the house, and they rise and fall gently with the valley, rows neat, the order that people bring to nature so that they can feed themselves. It’s a farm that feeds many, and the house watches over the rows and the people working in them.
One of the people is a seven year old boy who was born on the farm, in the house, coming into the world with clear eyes and a smile that is like fresh water. He and his brother are growing here, they go to school inside the house (as their sister did until she went away to school), they play Legos here, and they eat and eat and eat. There is always a plate of something, somewhere. And if you don’t finish it, don’t worry, someone else will get around to it.
There is also, right now, today, someone dying here, the grandfather with whom the seven year old shares a name. He is 69 and after decades of housing a spirit so large it could hardly be contained, his body is all that’s left. Soon, it too will be gone. Right now the little boy and his brother play 20 feet away, and stew is made in the kitchen, and someone sits and watches and holds the grandfather’s hand, telling him, again, that he can go as soon as he needs to. That we do not want to hold him.
The house is so large, in its smallness, so blessed and full of blessing. In the middle — no, not really: In the everywhere, in all the corners and all the rooms, on the stairs, at the door, lifting a body small, or weak, spreading a blanket over a child, or a man — is a woman with long hair falling over her shoulders, her nails clipped short for they are often in the dirt, her arms spread as wide as she can get them around the world and all the everyone and the everything that she can reach.
Occasionally — not often enough — she sits with a cup of tea and lets the house shelter and bless her as much as she and it have blessed others. As one life ends, and all the others carry on.
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Brett F. Moore died on March 6, 2010, at about the time that I was writing the above. I loved him, and I miss him more than I can say. I am so very grateful to have had him in my life. May his memory be for a blessing יהי זכרו ברוך
Posted by emilylhauser on March 6, 2012
http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/a-house-in-memory/
Good stuff: Halloween in Small Town America.
Halloween has a rhythm where I live. At about 3:05, the toddlers arrive, all monkeys and princesses and lions and so on — cute as buttons, only smaller. They can barely make it up the stairs, though one year, one had to make it all the way up the stairs and into the house, because when a toddler has to go potty, a toddler has to go potty.
Then come the elementary school kids, followed closely by the middle schoolers. The first group is still followed by parents, whereas the middle schoolers roam in packs of giggling shortness, people so close to being big and yet absolutely not-big-yet.
At that point, the occasional sullen teenager shows up, with little but a bandanna to suggest it might be a dress-up holiday, but I somehow manage to demand eye contact and a thank you, or at least a “Happy Halloween…”, by sheer dint of my own annoying friendliness. Look, I’ve bought about $80 worth of candy — I am going to smile and y’all are going to be friendly, darn it!
Then the teen moms and their toddlers and babies arrive, from across the border in Chicago. Indeed, all afternoon, folks are arriving from five blocks away, a neighborhood where paychecks are small and dangers real, and I am frankly happy to have them. It’s a chance for me to be a good neighbor to young families and little kids who I never see, otherwise, because the street that runs between our respective municipal borders serves almost as an iron wall. I only wish that when the teenagers show up, I could also hand out cans of beans and packages of condoms. Maybe some year I’ll offer at least the latter.
And then I run out of candy (and I mean: I buy about $80 worth!) before the evening is even really done, and I turn off my light, and my scattered family and I reconnoiter and wind up eating pizza at the same friends’ house, exhausted but also oddly exhilarated.
I love Halloween in my Small Town America enclave, where the schools are good, the population wildly diverse, the libraries built of a nice solid brick, and the fall leaves drifting everywhere around me. And it all starts in about 15 minutes! So off I go.
But if you’re interested in the etymology of the holiday’s name (presuming we’ve all heard the word “hallow” before — what, for heaven’s sake, is an “een”?), after the jump you’ll find a nice little piece that I read in the dead-tree version of the Chicago Tribune yesterday. Newspapers! Now that’s a business that seems haunted, mirite? I’m right.
Any who. Happy silliness to one and all!
Posted by emilylhauser on October 31, 2011
http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/halloween-in-small-town-america/
Another giant gone: Franklin E. Kameny.
In an echo of last week’s news, another American hero has passed, and my first intimation of both the heroism and the loss was the obituary.
Gay rights pioneer Franklin E. Kameny died of apparent natural causes at age 86 yesterday. And when I say “pioneer,” I really mean it. The Stonewall Riots, generally thought of as the launching pad of the modern gay rights movement, happened in 1969; Kameny was already fighting for the rights of gay Americans a decade earlier.
Oddly enough, he happens to have died on National Coming Out Day, a day that surely would not have been marked were it not for the work of courageous leaders like Kameny (indeed, Stonewall wouldn’t have happened if trailblazers like Kameny hadn’t already started blazing the trail).
From the obituary in The Washington Blade:
Born and raised in New York City, Kameny served in combat as an Army soldier in World War II in Europe. After the war, Kameny obtained a doctorate degree in astronomy from Harvard University.
He went on to work as an astronomer for the U.S. Army Map Service in the 1950s and was fired after authorities discovered he was gay. He contested the firing and appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the first known gay person to file a gay-related case before the high court. The Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling against Kameny and declined to hear the case, but Kameny’s decision to appeal the case through the court system motivated him to become a lifelong advocate on behalf of LGBT equality.
Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said Kameny “led an extraordinary life marked by heroic activism that set a path for the modern LGBT civil rights movement.”
“From his early days fighting institutionalized discrimination in the federal workforce, Dr. Kameny taught us all that ‘Gay is Good,’” Solmonese said. “As we say goodbye to this trailblazer on National Coming Out Day, we remember the remarkable power we all have to change the world by living our lives like Frank — openly, honestly and authentically.”
Chuck Wolfe, CEO of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, said Kameny’s death marked the “loss of a hero and a founding father of the fight to end discrimination against LGBT people.”
“Dr. Kameny stood up for this community when doing so was considered unthinkable and even shocking, and he continued to do so throughout his life,” Wolfe said. “He spoke with a clear voice and firm conviction about the humanity and dignity of people who were gay, long before it was safe for him to do so. All of us who today endeavor to complete the work he began a half century ago are indebted to Dr. Kameny and his remarkable bravery and commitment.”
I would argue that all Americans are indebted to Dr. Kameny. My country is a better place for harboring less bigotry, my children — no matter their sexuality — are coming of age in a place of greater compassion and acceptance because of his work. I am grateful to him, and so glad to have learned of his courage and leadership. I hope his passing was easy, and that those who loved him know comfort and peace today.
May his memory be for a blessing. יהי זכרו ברוך
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Another sure sign of the good work done by Franklin Kameny, Harvey Milk, Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon and other heroes like them is this story out of Harvard: “On National Coming Out Day, Athletes Come Out as Allies“:
Before their Tuesday afternoon practice, members of the Harvard varsity wrestling team posed for a picture on the steps in front of the Malkin Athletic Center. But instead of sporting their team uniforms in this photo, the athletes came in gay pride attire and rainbow pins that read “Proud Ally.”
In honor of National Coming Out Day, the men chose to wear the pins in solidarity with the BGLTQ community.
Harvard College Queer Students and Allies co-president Emma Q. Wang ’12 said that this year the student group wanted to emphasize the importance of coming out as an ally.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to be very vocal as an ally,” she said. “We want them to feel included because they play such an important role.”
According to wrestler David J. Lalo ’13, it was an [openly gay] non-resident tutor in Lowell House, Robert Joseph “R.J.” Jenkins, who inspired the team to participate in National Coming Out Day.
“[R.J.] has made a tremendous impact across our team,” Lalo said. “We wanted to show him we support the LGBT community.”
I mean honestly, check out the picture that accompanies the story:
There really is hope.
Posted by emilylhauser on October 12, 2011
http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/another-giant-gone-franklin-e-kameny/
