Posted By:
Rebecca

first fast

1
February

Last Friday, I ate lunch at the campus café.  When I got home that evening, faced with a low-key weekend full of reading and classwork, I decided spontaneously that I would fast for the weekend. David fasts once per year, and does it seriously.  He will fast either five or ten days, drinking some combination of juice and water depending on the length of it.  Why did I care to try it?  I typically display a severe lack of self-control when it comes to my appetites, and I wanted to see how a short fast would affect me and if I could be as disciplined as to reach my goal.  If I could manage a weekend of fasting, then maybe next time I could go for five days.

FRIDAY NIGHT

I was exhausted from the week.  Instead of a meal for dinner, I had a glass of apple juice while lounging in bed, surfing the net and watching my Netflix movie of the week.  My stomach rumbled occasionally, but instead of immediately trying to pacify the grumbliness (as I would normally do) my inner voice said, “EAT THE HUNGER, NOMNOMNOMNOM,” and that actually made me feel better every time, even in the few moments I craved chocolate.  I felt like I owned the hunger, and I trusted the hungry feeling would pass.  I fell asleep easily and slept well through the night, only waking up to let Pistachio out around 4:00am as his typical crepuscular schedule demands.

SATURDAY

My phone alarm woke me up around 8:30am.  I stretched, and lay there until Pistachio meowed at the window to be let in.  After obliging him, I lay back in bed and picked up the book from my bedside table, Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, which I’m reading for one of my classes.  The food for thought it offered was all I really needed at that moment.  Once I finally got out of bed, I showered, got dressed, and washed the dirty dishes left over from the latter part of the week – the last dishes I would wash for the weekend (one of the benefits of fasting).  I didn’t feel hungry all morning, so it was midday before I finally poured myself a glass of apple juice, which I sipped on periodically for about an hour.

The first twelve hours of the fast were already a helpful exercise in exploring my relationship with food consumption – one impacted by anxiety, living alone, liking to eat, and strong tendencies to procrastinate, to use food as comfort and to eat mindlessly.  I typically feel like I deserve to eat whatever I want as long as I exercise regularly, but then I end up eating whatever I want even when I’m not exercising regularly.  None of this is to say I constantly overeat or that I eat unhealthily—in fact, I think I have pretty healthy eating habits.  But American culture is one of indulgence and large portions, and that combined with my personal alcohol indulgence means I typically ingest more calories than my body needs on a daily basis.  I began to think that my new year’s resolutions related to the discipline of work, creativity and productivity should also extend to my physiological and nonphysiological food cravings.  Though on Friday night I’d felt slightly anxious about making it all weekend, as of Saturday morning I felt more confident that I could do it.

I ran a couple of errands that afternoon, one of which was to Whole Foods to buy more juice.  Whole Foods smelled scrumptrilescent.  Instead of feeling unhappy about my self-denial, I let the yummy smells themselves make me happy.  I bought two kinds of juice: papaya and pineapple – not realizing until later in the evening that papaya juice smells like vomit and has a slightly gross aftertaste.  I then decided to switch to the always-delicious pineapple juice.  Throughout the afternoon and evening, I was consistently surprised at how much I felt drawn to food without actually feeling hungry.  I’d always imagined that during a fast there would be a constant, painful hunger-grumble that I would have to deny, but it turns out the loudest, most insistent hunger was not the one in my belly.

Earlier in the day, my neighbor had invited me to a backyard fire-pit gathering that night at her place.  So around 10pm I took a cup of water over there and hung out for a while.  Beside the no food thing, something else that has always kept me from fasting (and kept me from taking antibiotics) is my dependence on love for drinking. But since I was already in the fasting frame of mind before this particular invite, it was easy for me to keep with it and be fine with sipping water by the fire.

SUNDAY

I woke up with a headache, which I think typically happens in the first few days of a fast.  I drank some water and poured a glass of juice, and the headache faded away after a bit.  I felt occasional light and rolling rumbles in the belly, but no pain and at this point I felt fine at the prospect of another day with no food.  How would I feel at the prospect of four more days with no food?  Not as confident, for sure, but maybe the trick is to take it one day at a time.

In the afternoon, I still felt fine.  When my stomach grumbled, I drank juice.  I spent my time focused on work and chores and singing and doing lots of stuff that just happened to not include preparing or eating food.  Earlier in the afternoon I was tempted by the food sitting out on my kitchen shelves (no pantry in my tiny apartment), but that lasted a hot minute and I moved onto the next thing.

MONDAY MORNING

I woke up in the morning feeling like I could keep going, but I decided to stick with my original plan.  I ate some granola cereal and got on with my day.  After one day of eating again, I feel like something has changed in me, that I’m not as drawn to satisfying any insecurities or anxieties with food my body doesn’t need.  We’ll see how long it lasts, but hopefully it’s something I can keep with me.  So far I feel calmer and more in control, not just of the food I eat but of the things I need and want to accomplish.  I feel like I can do it again if I need to “reset,” cleanse and calm myself in the future.  Oh, and I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in five days.  That in itself is pretty impressive.

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in life lessons | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

hardly education

17
January

Last semester, while discussing culture wars in American education, my professor told the story of her NYU professor friend who spent a few years teaching middle school social studies prior to pursuing his doctorate.  During a lesson on Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a student brought up that King had been unfaithful to his wife (information often used with the intent to disgrace King as a hypocrite and discredit in one fell swoop his work, activism, writings and beliefs).  To expand this student’s understanding of who King was as a historical figure, the teacher (now college professor) asked the student how we know that information (intense FBI surveillance of King). The rest of the story is a little fuzzy: the student goes home and informs dad of what he learned in school that day; dad contacts school, upset about it; teacher is reprimanded for it.

I am fine to take this story with a grain of salt by recognizing that the details are hazy and that my relaying it here makes it a third-hand account.  But hearing it reminded me that one of the most stultifying aspects of both my student and teaching experiences was that school rarely, if ever, felt like an intellectual space.  It reminds me that I learned more in my first semester of college than I did in four years of high school.  My entire life I’ve thirsted for intellectualism: for honest, analytical and thoughtful conversation, for classrooms full of engaging lessons and meaningful flows of communication between teachers and students, for a uniting awareness toward the goal of freedom from mental slavery.  (Hypothetical question alert.)  Is that too much to ask?

A person who cannot admit to personal mistakes and shortcomings is some kind of douchebag.  A nation that cannot admit to its historical realities and acknowledge its complexities is about the same.  Barfingly (that’s a word, right?), our culture doesn’t value admitting fault or weakness or wrongdoing, even when completely obvious.  That’s totally arrogant and obnoxious, and generally detrimental.

There’s something exceptionally disingenuous about an overarching narrative of freedom and justice that includes centuries of pretty horrific enslavement, terror, and discrimination – and proud, authoritative, biblical justification of these ills.  There’s something rotten about an education system and establishment that denounces certain facts as inappropriate to teach.  Any curriculum that seeks to indoctrinate with an unyielding narrative rather than educate with respect to facts, multiple perspectives, and open interpretation insults the intelligence of teachers and students, and is indicative of a public education system that values obedience over critical thought in both.  Such a system too often produces students characterized by various degrees of disillusionment or ignorance concerning society and humanity.

It comes down to the debate over the main purpose of public education.  Is it to educate or indoctrinate?  Is it to yield satisfactory economic success?  Or is it to strive for a society where more individuals can fulfill their minds’ and lives’ potential while exhibiting personal responsibility for themselves and their communities (where economic success is a byproduct)?  On the surface, education reform appears to be a sweetly bipartisan issue.  But make it meaningful, and it becomes bitterly divisive.  Many reformers argue for schooling to yield the development of critical thinkers, and I completely agree.  But as I look around and take things in, I cannot accept that our society or even the established education reformers truly desire as such.  To think critically is to always question authority and in significant ways.  Truth and knowledge are subversive.  Do we want a generation of students who will challenge us, our rules, our authority, our narrative?  Individual students do this already and are labeled as troublemakers, or as too smart for their own good. Too much thinking is a threat.

Until our communities can generally agree that progress is only achieved by challenging authority and the status quo, and by thinking critically and creatively enough to always seek new sets of common knowledge, we are not allowing these developing minds to fulfill their potential. A true education would encourage a student to push past false dichotomies, to speak truth to power, and to seek fulfillment of both an individual and societal potential.  A truly educated being is incapable of being a satisfied cog in a problematic machine.

We must relinquish the authority we cling to as our security blanket.  We must acknowledge our own ignorance and shortcomings (personally, socially, economically, politically), and demand our students do better than we have done.  We must encourage and develop questioning, critical minds.  Students know bullshit when they see it – why not encourage them to seek it out and to eradicate it?  The purposes of K-12 public education typically play out as authoritative indoctrination or its backfired attempt and too rarely as meaningful presentation, discussion, discovery, and creativity.   That is not okay.

And it just sucks.  It sucks that schools all over the U.S. are presenting a sanitized version of Dr. King to students, to fit the sanitized version of American history while originalist Republicans orchestrate a sanitized reading of the Constitution in Congress and students are taught to believe that the sanitized word “slave” in its context is somehow easier to swallow than the dirty word it’s replacing.

What a bunch of bullshit.

What’s not bullshit?  Love.  And love—like truth—is subversive.

Dr. King knew that well.

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in the personal is political | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

gay love from a straight girl

12
October

National Coming Out Day was yesterday, Judge Virginia Phillips ruled today that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is unconstitutional, and a recent rash of publicized bullying and suicides have raised awareness about the intolerance and discrimination that are still far too prevalent and evident in our communities.  The only choice in this equation is the choice to love or to hate.  I choose love, I love love – mine and yours…and now, some vignettes and thoughts and such.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt was my celebrity crush when I was fifteen and he starred on Third Rock From the Sun.  This crush climbed to an entirely new level when he guest-starred on another of my favorites, That 70’s Show, as Eric’s popular yet ambivalently closeted lab partner.  When he went in for the kiss I was waiting for, I screamed and bounced up and down on the couch excitedly, probably while my mom was wondering from the kitchen what was wrong with her otherwise well-adjusted daughter.  Still, it was more than I could have imagined or hoped for—I knew there was a good reason this actor was the one I was hot for.  (Full disclosure: he’s still my celebrity crush twelve years later, along with Andy Samberg now and Viggo Mortensen circa 1999.)

Cut to some years later, when the summer after my freshman year of college I became interested in the Strokes.  Before I was ever familiar with their music, I loved them because I’d read that they sometimes kissed each other on stage.  Another few years went by, I’d graduated from college and Mysterious Skin was out on DVD.  My old crush was still playing gay, continuing to make him hot in real life.  Watching Y Tu Mama Tambien together for the first time, my closest friends and I had to rewind and re-watch Diego Luna’s and Gael Garcia Bernal’s gorgeous tease of an edited scene accompanied by our sighs and interjected affirmations.  And, though I don’t typically wish I lived in decades past, I do slightly regret not being alive when David Bowie was at his young, androgynous, bohemian best–just to have witnessed it.  My affinity for mostly straight men who are unafraid of being perceived as or behaving as gay or bisexual is apparent.  But why do I feel this way?

1.  I am repulsed by homophobia in men; it only makes sense that I’m attracted to the opposite.  Gay love or sex scenes in shows like Six Feet Under or Queer as Folk don’t do it for me, though they don’t turn me off.  To be turned on by it I need to feel like I’d have a place in it.  So my attraction mainly extends to “straight” guys who play gay – or who happily play around at it.  When a friend asked me if I thought Gordon-Levitt was “a method actor,” my face lit up and I replied: “I fucking hope so!”

2.  To display, participate in, or discuss personal homosexual behavior in American society takes confidence and courage.  This is true for people of all sexual orientations, and genuine confidence is sexy in anyone.

3.  Homophobia is yet another display of many Americans’ puritanical views on sex in general.  If you accept sex as a healthy display of love or affection and if you truly value its pleasure and goodness, you cannot be afraid of or sickened by homosexual love or affection.  By being open to and understanding of love, comfort and touch between people of the same sex is to then become more open to heterosexuality.  It’s all the same language, just with different slang.

If you read the Wikipedia article about David Bowie, there is a section outlining the comments he has made about his self-proclaimed and later retracted bisexuality.  The reason he appears to contradict himself is that he was being asked to explain himself to people who lack the language or conceptualizations with which to understand his behavior.  Quick, label his sexual deviance!  Consider this, though: of course he and Mick Jagger ended up in bed together!  They were hot rock stars living during yet another sexual revolution.  Whether either man considers himself bisexual is beside the point.  Heterosexual, bisexual – they were sexual.   It is futile and unimportant to try to arrange everyone on the sexual continuum, to quantify sexual attraction to one sex or another.  Kanye asks, “How a man stay faithful in a room full of hoes?”  Well, how a man stay hetero in a world full of liberating access to excesses of every kind: music, art, money, drugs and sex?  And, when he doesn’t, how a woman not think it’s fucking hot?

I wish for my future children to live in a world that is more respectful of and easygoing about sexuality than the one I have grown up in; I wish for them to experience open and egalitarian and honest and healthy sexuality.  All respect to the life-source, and to the love and pleasure that makes life so sweet.

That 70′s Show gayness

Judge’s DADT ruling

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in the personal is political | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

Tea

5
October

For the past six or seven or eight months I’ve wasted many hours in an electronic debate with someone who has vastly different political views than I do.  I was baited into it by his assertion that he believed what he believed because he thought it based on reason.  What a joke, and what an idiot I was to take the bait.  The people I’ve dealt with in the past simply stop responding when they feel themselves being taken out of their comfort zone.  This guy responded suddenly to say he was “out,” and to respond to maybe two minor points of what had become a lengthy and complex debate.  This when I was eagerly awaiting his answers to questions I’d last posed.  Seriously.  It’s part of the reason I haven’t been posting on here, because it took up time I’d otherwise devote to Rouge Musings…but enough.  I’m back to just posting rather than engaging.  Most people don’t care about reason or logic.  They care about what they care about, and that is all.  What a waste.

Below is a little bit of my last response.  It was written hastily and passionately.  It is not near perfect or complete, but in the end I arrived at a point that distilled the verbosity down to a new and concise realization.  And actually, I feel a little peace about it.

“I am in favor of effective government that is as free from waste as possible.  Case in point: I am in favor of an educational system that actually educates students, which is why I dedicate myself to the reform of that system.  (Oh, and Thomas Jefferson believed in public education at the expense of the masses because he knew a strong democracy demanded well-educated voters.)  I believe that education is the most unifying solution to many problems in society, ones that plague me every day and make me have to look over my shoulder repeatedly anytime I am walking alone or entering my apartment at night.  I think about it when I go to sleep by myself in my apartment in Nashville, when I hear about a woman and her child taken off guard and viciously shot down back in Baton Rouge.  I prefer to live in a society that is safer, where people are smarter and have the tools to make better lives for themselves so that we do not have to have so many rely on a welfare state that empowers no one but that we earned with our history of wrongs.  I know that if I hate welfare, I have to hate capitalism for justifying slavery, hate slaveowners and those who passed and supported laws making it illegal to teach slaves to read.  I have to hate those who deprived blacks of education, then when they were finally able to fight for education, they found themselves still discriminated against and unable to make a life for themselves like that the white man had access to.  I have to hate those who thought it was fine to completely destroy their family structures.  I have to hate those TODAY who still believe that black children are intellectually inferior to white children and black people inferior to whites.  I have to hate an economic system that rewards people based on the market rather than based on what’s right, where people can work their asses off doing good for their community and financially get nowhere, where maybe the only college educated people poor children see in their life are their overworked, miserable, martyred teachers.

I am aware that capitalism as perpetuated in the United States has been the source/excuse of some of the most horrid evils this world has ever known, and that is why I am always critical of it; not because I am a socialist or a communist or not at all a capitalist but because I know there is danger in blind obedience and jingoism and oversimplification, that I think there is a better way that has not yet been tried or maybe even thought of yet.  I believe that regulation is NECESSARY because greed has been shown to have horrendous negative effects on our society.  So again, if you hate regulation, then hate the corporations who take such advantage of our resources that regulation is rendered necessary.

I will always believe that greater love, communication and togetherness is the answer, not isolationism and concern for oneself and one’s family without taking into consideration how the way one lives affects others in the community and our future generations.

I am NOT a liberal, I have stated that before in my writings to you.  You hate waste?  I do too, but I hate hypocrisy and willful ignorance more.  Maybe that’s the real difference between us, I hate the cause, you hate the effect.”

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in the personal is political | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

pawn shop

28
August

If all it took was to raise hell and rage against darkness, we’d all be free.  If there were any completely right answer, we’d have figured it out by now.  Instead, the controllers play protest songs at Guantanamo at deafening levels because they can and we’re stuck pondering this paralyzing paradox, that silence is weakness and speech futile.  And when I say that even the players are pawns, what I mean is even the most powerful don’t control their framework; it is the Frankenstein of the ages, bigger than us all and bigger than each of us, yet something we created in the first place, so riddle me that.

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in life lessons | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

mosque hysteria

27
August

Here is a link to the best thing I’ve yet read/heard about the mosque/Islamic center controversy, posted by a friend on Facebook.  Everyone everywhere should read this, straight from the Memphis Flyer.  First, a taste:

“I can neither accept nor believe that the spirit and principles of our remarkable Constitution were crushed beneath the crumbling walls of the Twin Towers, destroyed within the burning debris of the Pentagon, or scattered across the gently rolling fields of Pennsylvania. That’s neither the America I know and love nor the country that I served for 21 years in the Army. And it is certainly not representative of the price of freedom that far too many brave men and women have paid with their lives over the past two centuries.”

Brilliant truth.  Read it.

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in the political is personal | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

crude awakening

16
May

Another catastrophe hits the Gulf Coast.  A veritable ecosystems-destroying, this-region-will-never-be-the-same-again, absolute disaster.  And all most of us can do is watch and wait with stress in our chests, sadness in our hearts, and lots of anger.

This is what collateral damage looks like.

There is so much to say, so much yet to unfold, and no way to comprehend it all.  Not now.  This is one for the books.

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in the political is personal | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

rouge neck

17
March

Both sides of my family are conservative and working class.  Throughout the years, many an anti-liberal, anti-intellectual, anti-Democratic-candidate email forward has landed unwelcome in my inbox.  I try to keep the peace sometimes, but I resent when others feel complete freedom to make their views known to me while I’m told to just delete the email if I disagree.  That makes no sense.  After some years and a few in-depth and passionate email debates, I managed to be removed from people’s group lists, and I don’t much receive the stuff anymore.  Occasionally, though, my mother will receive one so egregious that she passes it on to me, as misery does love company.  Here is one she recently sent over to me, with my commentary following.

You Might Be a Redneck….a different take

We have enjoyed the redneck jokes for years. It’s time to take a reflective look at the core beliefs of a culture that values home, family, country and God. If I had to stand before a dozen terrorists who threaten my life, I’d choose a half dozen or so rednecks to back me up.  Tire irons, squirrel guns and grit — that’s what rednecks are made of.  I hope I am one of those. If you feel the same, pass this on to your redneck friends. Ya’ll know who ya’ll are.

You might be a redneck if:

1. It never occurred to you to be offended by the phrase, ‘One nation, under God.’
2. You’ve never protested about seeing the 10 Commandments posted in public places.
3. You still say ‘ Christmas’ instead of ‘Winter Festival.’
4. You bow your head when someone prays.
5. You stand and place your hand over your heart when they play the National Anthem.
6. You treat our armed forces veterans with great respect, and always have.
7. You’ve never burned an American flag, nor intend to.
8. You know what you believe and you aren’t afraid to say so, no matter who is listening.
9. You respect your elders and raised your kids to do the same.
10. You’d give your last dollar to a friend.

If you got this email from me, it is because I believe that you, like me, have just enough Red Neck in you to have the same beliefs as those talked about in this email.

God Bless the USA !

Keep the fire burning, redneck friend.
IF YOU DON’T STAND BEHIND OUR TROOPS FEEL FREE TO STAND IN FRONT OF THEM

IN GOD WE TRUST
_______________________________________________________

Let’s deconstruct this, shall we?
_______________________________________________________

1. It never occurred to you to be offended by the phrase, ‘One nation, under God.’

…because rednecks believe that our country’s founders were escaping religious freedom and coming to America to establish a religious state?  The phrase “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance on June 14, 1954.  Three days later, on June 17, freely elected president of Guatemala Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by our very own CIA.  See, Arbenz’s proposed land reforms in his country would have threatened the operations of the United Fruit Company, which had close ties to the White House and the CIA.  The phrase ‘under God’ offends me not just because it conflates religion with government, but because if we are going to amend the Pledge, it should more accurately/less hypocritically be changed to ‘one nation, under corporations, divisible, with liberty and justice for some.’  I suppose that the true lesson here is that rednecks value the individual liberties granted them by their country, but not similar rights for others in other countries.

2. You’ve never protested about seeing the 10 Commandments posted in public places.

I’d rather people just followed the ten commandments than self-righteously prop them up for public view.  Newsflash: Not all U.S. citizens are Christian, and the authors of the Constitution were careful to separate church and state.  You obey a higher law?  Fine, but 1) You probably don’t and 2) Display it on your own property (the one you don’t share with the rest of your state and country).


3. You still say ‘ Christmas’ instead of ‘Winter Festival.’

Talk about being offended by nothing.  I assume that what the author meant to say is that as a redneck, you still say “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays,” or you still call it “Christmas break” rather than “Winter break.”  First of all, it takes a lot of sensitivity to be offended by the increasing popularity of an all-inclusive description or well-wish.  Furthermore, you get to say whatever you want, and telling someone “Merry Christmas” is neither against the law nor will it bring a lawsuit upon you.  If businesses decide to post banners that say “Happy Holidays,” it is because they do not wish to exclude a portion of their paying customers who do not celebrate Christmas.  So shut up.  Calling public school vacations “winter break” is smart.  Not all U.S. citizens who pay taxes are Christian, so in summation, get the fuck over yourself.


4. You bow your head when someone prays.

You’re right, I refuse to bow my head 100% of the time.  And I get it: rednecks are Christian and like to demonize, ostracize or criticize those who aren’t.  And I will bow my head out of respect, depending on what the prayer is for.


5. You stand and place your hand over your heart when they play the National Anthem.

Okay, I get this, too.  Rednecks are patriots.  They love their country because it is godly and pure and disdain the rest of the world.


6. You treat our armed forces veterans with great respect, and always have.

Isn’t this becoming a bit redundant?  Rednecks: you apparently believe that being pro-war equates with being pro-soldier, and that being anti-war means being anti-soldier, but motives for military service are evidence of character – some veterans are assholes, and some are awesome.  Some join the armed forces to kill people – that I can’t respect.  Some join with the intention of protecting freedom, and that I can though I think it a misguided motive.  Some join because it was their best option to live a comfortable life – that I can respect while frustrated by a government and an economic system that preserves a reliable underclass to be “bodies on the ground.”  I understand that those who are sent into wars are leaving home and loved ones, and that much sadness, pain and loneliness is endured as a result even if they do come home alive.  It’s tragic, as is all sadness, pain, loneliness and loss.


7. You’ve never burned an American flag, nor intend to.

Burning an American flag is a form of free speech protected by the U.S. Constitution’s first amendment.  Yes, you read that right–the first amendment.  What’s incredible to me, though, is when the desecration of a symbol is seen as more despicable and disgusting than the destruction of human life–whether it’s burning a flag, tearing out pages of the Bible, burning the Koran, or publishing a portrayal of Mohammed.  Destruction of spirit, flesh and bone is what should truly be maddening.  We are the only animal that kills itself so well.  What’s also incredible is that many Americans can passively accept that the American flag, as a symbol of the United States (citizens and government), ONLY represents goodness, and therefore its destruction is always a negative.  However, as a symbol of such a varied landscape, it represents not only glory and freedom.  The truth is that most people who choose to exercise their right to burn the flag do so to protest the ills perpetrated by our country, such as the documented and confirmed instances of active disregard for human rights and democracy, both at home and abroad – and in that case burning the flag is an act of righteousness.  Careful that you’re not using the flag as a blindfold.


8. You know what you believe and you aren’t afraid to say so, no matter who is listening.

…and no matter what the facts are, or better yet, what the truth is.


9. You respect your elders and raised your kids to do the same.

It is healthy to question authority.  It was authority that oversaw the fields, authority that legally sanctioned wife-beating, authority that taught the youth to call people ‘niggers.’  It is authority that sells corrupt military action and puts people in jail for growing pot.  It is authority that suspended a Louisiana child from school for telling his classmate his mom is a lesbian.  It was authority that beat and gassed the marchers in Selma. In our culture, increased age does not necessarily correspond with increased wisdom. If it did, it wouldn’t then be the young forces that so often have been behind the most momentous social progress of our history.  Respect should be given by everyone, but it must be earned by everyone.


10. You’d give your last dollar to a friend.

 

What, are you putting it in her G-string?


If you got this email from me, it is because I believe that you, like me, have just enough Red Neck in you to have the same beliefs as those talked about in this email.

God Bless the USA !

Keep the fire burning, redneck friend.
IF YOU DON’T STAND BEHIND OUR TROOPS FEEL FREE TO STAND IN FRONT OF THEM

So because I’m opposed to war, I should be killed?  I’m not following your logic.  So far, your modern wars are not proving themselves to protect me or my freedom, and this affront is greatest to those who have trusted our nation’s military not to put them in harm’s way for no good reason.  Your support for wasted military action is the ultimate disregard for our troops and the civilians who shall be killed.

IN GOD WE TRUST
So let me get this straight.  From what I gather, your GOD drinks bud light, hates fags and Arabs and Muslims (or terrorists), flies the American flag (and the rebel flag) at HIS/HER place.  GOD takes no issue with racism, economic injustice, or Americans’ obsession with materialism, money, war, sex as a weapon and Hummers.  S/HE has no problem with environmental degradation (it’s not like S/HE created this world or anything).  S/HE looks the other way when the U.S. government makes its decisions for short-term economic and political gain, rather than to remain in line with justice and a higher righteousness.

I appreciate your attempt to reclaim the word ‘redneck’ like gay people did with the word you used to throw at them before you beat them up.  Tire irons, squirrel guns, and grit.  Are you going after terrorists, or uppity Negroes?  Get off of your high horse and come back down to Earth.

For real: This piece of work insults the intellect.  It attempts to categorize as superior a group of by definition reactionary, ignorant and prejudiced people who base their supposed superiority on selfish, questionable, hypocritical and flawed arguments.  The injustice is not that rednecks are misunderstood.  It is that they misunderstand so much.  (And do not even think you get to claim the word “y’all.”  That is efficient, gender-inclusive language.)  Thanks for reading, y’all.

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in the personal is political | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

another disenfranchise

10
March

Too often intellectualism has been treated as the mark of a schizophrenic–of someone whose thought processes are divorced from reality.  But also too often have intellectuals refrained from truly translating their theory into practice, supporting the anti-intellectual’s case by default.

I often express the more poetic side of my nature in my free time, but somehow have never seriously considered doing so more fully in my life.  Monday morning arrives and I arise to subject myself all over again to the emotionally abusive grind.  The analytical part of me, however obnoxiously and to my dismay, continues to writhe up from its oppressed innards to my mind’s surface.  It shoots out of my searching, piercing eyes as my unceasing ruminations on society and nature push me ever further on my life’s parabola – not toward a schizophrenic theoretics but toward a different sort of mental illness-a more general madness (or is this sanity?)–an increasingly anxious malaise.

All of the apparent and persistently espoused logic that made my mother insist on my going to law school (the same logic that made me refuse to go to law school) continues to propel me down a path of learning and questioning to formulate solutions to whatever problems I ponder. When I was a kid, I’d lie awake at night trying to figure out how the world could be saved (seriously).  Fortunately, the bigger picture doesn’t keep me up at night anymore; I’ve learned to focus on a smaller locus of control.  At the end of every question, I found that love and education were always the answers, and so I have arrived at certain beliefs in solutions and am willing to commit a lifetime to contributing toward their pursuit.  That is all that saves me from giving up on everything that surrounds me.

I grew up in a slightly shady part of South Baton Rouge, and my knowledge of North Baton Rouge extended to the intersection of N. Foster and Gus Young where I attended Greenville Elementary for five years.  EBRPSS’s desegregation plan had me on a school bus for about 2½-3 hours per day, taking me from a majority black neighborhood in the Burbank/Gardere area to the larger majority black area where Greenville Elementary sits.  From first through fifth grade, prior to attending McKinley Middle and Baton Rouge High, I sat in Gifted/Talented classrooms full of mostly white and Asian students.  At recess, there were sometimes memorable playground interactions and incidents between the “gifted” kids and the “regular” ones that served as lessons, especially when I would report them to my mom in the evenings after school.  She was vehement in her reminders to her young daughter that I was no better than any of the other students in my school, or anyone else.  I was in my twenties before I realized the extent of North Baton Rouge and learned that the oft-joked about intersection of Plank & Airline wasn’t a true intersection at all.

Because my job has me working with schools strewn across the northern half of my hometown, I often find myself making new connections between my city and my perception of it as I travel down old roads, past old houses, for the first time.  I reflect on how a decades-long desegregation case failed to fix our schools.  I reflect on what I know needs to be done to get good teachers in every school.  I reflect on all I am ignorant of that needs to happen.  I reflect on how, in that revolutionized system, I would do whatever it took to be worthy enough to gain a teaching position.  And if I were not good enough, I would respect that, too.

For those on the outside, our low-income youth are often viewed as a faceless, nameless lot, devoid of individuality or talent.  That perception is a lie.  It reduces them to a mass-produced stereotyped shell that in no way encompasses the vitality and potential that lies therein.  Too many people still call the problems of poverty ‘insurmountable’-those people are ignorant.  There is hard proof to the contrary; the problems are surmountable indeed.  Without condemning families and communities that have had to struggle historically and presently to get by, we need to expand the attractive life choices available to these kids.

Disenfranchisement comes in many forms. Education has been perverted in our culture, so that it not only keeps disenfranchised our low-income youth, but it disenfranchises an entire generation of educated adults who see few options to live comfortably while thoughtfully, diligently and positively shaping society.  Most see no benefit to being an educator of students in pre-K to 12th grades and so take alternate routes into supposedly lucrative careers of medicine, law, or business; intellectual careers in higher ed; or, at a loss, stick to the service industry or state jobs.  Or, like me, they work in education but outside of the classroom.  ‘Educators,’ currently, are too often nothing of the sort.  It is the fundamental problem in our educational system and general society, and, if fixed, would be revolutionarily liberating from the collective mental slavery that binds us and drives some of us to a limiting, functional madness.  Education is the passing of culture.  By how much we value these fundamental shapers of our shared reality, we make our own choice.  If most people don’t do their job, people are inconvenienced. If teachers don’t do their job, our society will degenerate into increased chaos and move that much closer to its collapse.  So instead of considering the artistry and analytics within me as opposing forces, I’ve finally realized that creativity and discipline are both integral to balanced growth.  I can consciously move on with positive passion and healthy doses of both, as that battle within me has ceased.

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in the personal is political | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

dem Saints

9
February

In Super Bowl XLIV, it was the first time the winning team had lost their last three regular season games.  It was the first time a team kicked an onside kick prior to the 4th quarter.  It was the first time a kicker made three field goals longer than 40 yards.  It was only the second time a team came back from a ten-point deficit to win it.  It was the first time the Saints won the Super Bowl, after 43 years of franchise existence.

Sunday night was everything we wanted.  We wanted to win, but if it wasn’t to be we at least wanted a good, close game — anything but an embarrassing blowout.  The Colts were heavy favorites. We Saints fans had been bombarded all season and especially during the two weeks leading up to the big game with reasons why the Colts were the superlative team, the dominant team, the most likely championship team.  We knew the Saints could be that team, though, because we’d been watching them all season.  We had already witnessed many seeming miracles that made us believe.  Yet, despite the exciting wins and impressive stats, the Saints were given only a begrudging respect — the historically losing franchise represents, after all, a city and state that put the ‘fun’ in ‘dysfunctional, corrupt and backward,’ and many commentators and football fans were just waiting for them to blow it, waiting for the curtain to be pulled back, waiting for the child to point at the naked emperor and announce the obvious for all to finally see.  Many were just plain hating on the Saints.

Well, think again or suck it.  Our low-ranked defense proved itself in a stunning redemption and our offense played both subtly and incredibly well.  Brees completed 32 of 39 passes to finish the game with 288 passing yards.  After Colston dropped that first perfectly placed pass, he realized he didn’t want to let that happen again.  Special teams shocked everyone with their onside kick to open up the third quarter, and the offense took it home like they knew they had to after those unsuccessful running plays cost us a TD in the second quarter.  Shockey caught a touchdown pass after having had to sit out due to injury and watch his team lose the last three games of the regular season, and of course Port Allen’s own Tracy Porter swooped into the end zone with an intercepted ball in one hand and the other raised, pumping in the air in jubilant, celebratory fashion.  Our defense closed it out by shutting down the Colts in their red zone when they went for it on 4th. (Colts were #2 in the league for scoring inside the red zone, but the Saints were #2 in the league for defending the red zone, and the Saints won.)

Prior to the game, the commentators commented their commentary that no team had ever had a 3-game losing streak at the end of the regular season and gone on to win the big game.  Oh, and they were first-timers at the Super Bowl, so that made a Saints victory less likely.  (Only 4 out of 19 teams making their initial Super Bowl appearance have won against their more experienced competitors.  Well, now it’s 5 out of 20.)  Our coaching staff knew to save its best players for when it really counted.  Our coaching staff knew that focus, practice and preparation would give the Saints the edge and ability to win, and refused to accept that a loss this time around would prepare the team for a better chance later on — nope, the future is NOW, and it feels damn good.

And look: a championship football team is by no means an appropriate or sufficient metaphor for a city that still has within it so many struggles.  But beyond the raised money and revenue jolt, this Saints season has united our region, and the Saints fans and Louisiana natives all around the world.  The team knows it is an important emblem of the city, and it’s heartening that New Orleans is in the international news for such a joyous reason.  The Saints refused to pay mind to the naysayers — instead they were visionary and hardworking and saw that they could make history by coming in off a losing streak, coming in as a first-time Super Bowl team, coming in as the freaking New Orleans Saints and becoming National Champions in Super Bowl XLIV.  The Colts did not lose the game; the Saints won it.  Destiny isn’t fairy dust or a god playing chess.  Destiny is the intersection of vision, effort, cooperation, confidence and execution.  It’s buoyed by the collective positive thinking of fans in Louisiana and around the world who know, love and appreciate New Orleans for what it is.  This win doesn’t fix nearly any problems, but it shows us that the past does not have to control the present.  We can and must break out of old chains to claim and create an improved reality.  New Orleans may be a queen city that overshadows BR, the rest of the state, and the whole Gulf Coast region, but thank goodness for her and the Saints that represent all of us.  Hallelujah, laissez les bon temps, and WHO DAT SAY DEY GONNA BEAT DEM SAINTS???!!!  Happy Mardi Gras y’all!

Below are some links for your viewing pleasure.

Drew Brees w/ son after win (video & pics).  (I love Drew Brees so, so, SO much.)

Drew Brees on Letterman 2/8/10 (Humble, charming, endearing, and THE BEST QUARTERBACK IN THE LEAGUE)

Drew Brees more accurate than an Olympic archer?  Fun analysis.

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in southern grotesque | Comments (0)