Seen last night after work, sign in the entryway of the busy liquor store near the thrift store.
(Lake St. is a very busy street.)
This made me laugh (in recognition). Burke is talking about the American Colonies (the lesser power) and Great Britain (the greater power ):
"When any community is subordinately connected with another,
the great danger of the connexion is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior,
which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favor.
It is a powerful corrective to such a very rational cause of fear, if the inferior body can be made to believe, that the party inclination or political views of several in the principal state, will induce them in some degree to counteract this blind and tyrannic partiality.There is no danger that any one acquiring consideration or power in the presiding state should carry this leaning to the inferior too far.
The fault of human nature is not of that sort.
Power in whatever hands is rarely guilty of too strict limitations on itself."
What I hear:
People-in-charge decide things in their own favor, mostly. (Their pride and complacency, which leads them to do this, is dangerous to everyone.)
Among the people-in-charge, some might be "a useful ally" to people who are not-in-charge.
But those allies won't go tooooo far in their support, because that's not how people are.
The lesser party may "obtain influence" through giving favors that the rulers feel obliged to return, sometimes.
"Every hot controversy is not a civil war."
But some are.
I. Breaking
I'm going to stop blogging here--take a break, at least for a while.
I'm trying to hash out what's going on in my city, to the people around me, and to me, and to figure out what my role is.
This just isn't the place for me to do that.
II. Mending
There's lots going on right by me.
1. I'm thrilled that a new sewing & mending store--Rethink Tailoring––has moved into a nearby empty shop (it used to be a quilting shop).
They're "new" in a way that reflects the times:
"We opened our storefront on March 14th, 2020 and had to close the next day due to the pandemic." [blog post about their history]Their emphasis is on recycling and environmental sustainability, and they hold classes to share knowledge about doing that.
"During this very unique year, our community helped us help people. We donated over 700 masks to hospitals, homeless shelters, the Sanctuary encampment, George Floyd Memorial, childcare facilities, and to the community in our free mask box."
"There is only so much one person can do alone, but by building a community around reuse and upcycling we can do so much more, together."
I'm turning off comments on this post, but email or snail mail me, blogfriends, if you want.
Love you! Best wishes to you all!
XO Fresca
Just got home from ten days of condo/cat sitting.
Coming home, I had so much stuff, rather than bike home loaded lopsided, I put my bike on the bus--all buses have a rack on front for bikes.
"While the activities and aesthetics that cottagecore embraces are wide-ranging and complex, covering everything from fashion to gardening, cooking to frolicking, so too are its origins.And from yesterday--Marcia Howard reporting on being pointed out by name by "mercenaries from CRG* with AMs" [automatic weapons] at a vigil for Winston Smith.
"It’s in part a reaction against capitalism and our increasing time spent in front of a screen, but also related to ongoing interests in wellness and sustainability, and more broadly the idea of social consciousness."
NOTE: I'm sorta in the middle of this post, but I have to go to work, so I'm posting it as is, a bit jumbled, but it's important to me to be thinking this stuff through--
that, is:
how should I, an ordinary person, think and act well in extraordinary times?
(Or, How to be good in bad times?)
History is always happening, every second is new––but there are times when social change is so, um, momentous, we know we are in History with a capital H.
I feel that now, especially living in the town where the police murdered George Floyd. But everywhere there's climate breakdown, Covid, and of course the everpresent ordinary moral and political challenges of being a human being.
Thinking About Thinking
Obviously, no one needs to read or comment on these posts--I am hashing this through for myself.
I am thinking and writing this stuff out because I am living in a city where the social fabric is... mmmm... how to put it?
. . . rearranging itself?
We will be voting in just a few weeks on whether to throw out the police force!
What?
Like, how am I supposed to know if that's a good idea?
Obviously THIS police force is rotten, but what will we replace it with?
Got Ideas?
A couple people recently have said to me that I am overthinking things.
(I asked Penny Cooper, the lead doll, about this and she was flummoxed. She had never heard of overthinking!)
Thinking in itself is no guarantee of action, or right action, that's true enough!
But for me, relying on old habits of thinking ,or relying on intuition based on input from the past, is not adequate in these changing times.
These BIG change times.
For me, thinking is part of/preparation for taking action.
I don't like to be motivated primarily by emotion or unexamined biases, because I've seen how unreliable they can be.
Call me Spock. (Ha, not really, but he was a big influence, with his insistence on rationality as a basis for action.)
I appreciate that Hannah Arendt "attempted in her work [writing/philosophy] to shine the light of intellect on the extreme darkness she lived through [Nazism]".
--New Yorker article, "Beware of Pity: Hannah Arendt and the Power of the Impersonal"
Her essay I wrote about yesterday (and here)––"Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship" (1964) PDF here (about 30 pages)–– wrestles with the way people in Germany went along with Nazi atrocities, even though they didn't believe in them.
“The more you realize that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become,” wrote a journalist about Bosnian atrocities.Ordinary People
[––same New Yorker article as above]
"You told me our neighbors on the street needed to know God has made them FOR A PURPOSE.And he said no, he hadn't, though he'd wanted to.
I think that kind of awareness--that 'I matter, my life has some bigger purpose that I don't even know'––can be a huge protector against despair, which a lot of people on the street are especially prey too.
You don't even need to believe in God to believe that.
Did you talk to any of them about that?"
____________________________________
Resist Early, Resist Often
Arendt wrote about people going along with the demands of a dictatorship giving the reason that doing so would avoid worse things happening, ". . . with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse––until a stage was reached [in Nazi dictatorship] where nothing worse could possibly have happened."
She wrote:
"We see here how unwilling the human mind is to face realities which in one way or another contradict totally its framework of reference.
Unfortunately, it seems to be much easier to condition human behavior and to make people conduct themselves in the most unexpected and outrageous behavior,
than it is to persuade anybody to learn from experience, as the saying goes;
that is, to start thinking and judging instead of applying categories and formulas which are deeply ingrained in our mind, but whose basis of experience has been long forgotten and whose plausibility resides in their intellectual consistency rather than in their adequacy to actual events."
I say I don't like politics, but then I was ALL EXCITED to see this book at the library: Writing Politics: An Anthology.
(Well, liking to read about politics is different than doing politics.)
Because I like the publisher, New York Review of Books, and their Classics series, I guessed it would have great entries.
I checked it out, took it home, and immediately read the last essay:
"Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorships" by Hannah Arendt (1964, the year after her report Eichmann in Jerusalem).
You can read it online--it's only a few pages.
Upshot:
Arendt says you may get a legal pass for doing bad things under a dictatorship, but you don't get a moral pass.
Do I agree?
I should think about it more, maybe, but yes, I do.
I always thought the Catholic Church's teaching that you shouldn't choose bad things for good ends was wise.
(Arendt says that the Talmud says the same thing. The "lesser evil" is a trick.)
I mean, I’d say maybe you (we) do sorta "have to" do a lesser evil sometimes, say, the classic example:
You steal medicine for a child who needs it to stay alive;, (or, you don’t have money so you steal tampons for a friend so they don’t bleed all over)…
but that doesn't make it (stealing) morally right.
If we do such things, and we may, and for very compelling good reasons,
we still have to live with the wound to our moral conscience.
The right thing to do may be a bad thing, which doesn’t mean it’s not a bad thing.
Not said in this essay of Arendt, but this is one of the main reasons it's good to work to create healthy societies—so people (we) don't have to make such bad trade-offs.
Free menstrual supplies for all! (see post below)
FREE MENSTRUAL SUPPLIESSo clear & simple. AND SHORT: The best signs say the most with the least.
Ask at desk.
"Biological functions don't necessarily align with gender identification. We want to help you with those functions."Nicely done!
I can get behind this:
Clear public information making things/freedoms open or available for anyone who wants or needs them.
Some people might not like the point being made, but no one's rights are infringed upon.
No one is made to say or do anything, or asked to sign up or actively give their assent.
II. IF YOU CHOOSE....
So, yeah: after thinking a lot about it, I still don't like when groups tell you at introduction time to give your "name and pronouns".
As
with extra thingamabobs on a website (for instance, email notifications
forever after), the "give your pronoun" option should be to opt in, not to opt out.
And,
I think places that serve the public should to do as much as possible
to make full options Clear & Easily Available, for those who want to
opt in.
It would be better if we said at introduction time:
"Give your name and, if you choose, your pronouns."Because social pressure to SAY something in public is very different than reading a public sign about services available.
Putting signs offering free menstrual supplies in all bathrooms may serve unintended people too.
Say a friend or family member of a menstruating person knows the person needs supplies but is too shy to ask, or doesn't have any money, or is simply waiting outside.
Now that friend or family member (who may use either bathroom) knows the supplies are available and can get them for their menstruating friend.
Or, for that matter, someone might need a menstrual pad for some other use. When I was walking Camino, a man had placed one under his backpack's shoulder strap, where it was digging into his flesh.
Very super.
I want to show respect for a person (the same respect I would like to get) by using their proper pronouns, and also by learning their name, if that's fitting.
I often ask regular customers their names--it signals, "I see you."
(Some people don't want engagement, and I leave them alone.)
Sometimes I'm scared to talk to people (far less often as I get older)--What if I do something wrong? There's a fear of hurting others inadvertently + a fear of being embarrassed oneself.
I've taken heart from something writer/ organizer/theorist and transgender right activist Leslie Feinberg said about pronouns:
The pronoun itself matters, yes.
It also matters how the speaker uses a pronoun, even if it's the wrong one. With respect?
Or not?
So, cultivating respect for individuals (and their right to self-determination)--that's key. Pronouns/names follow.
From Leslie Feinberg's obituary on hir website (2014):
[Begin quote]
Leslie preferred to use the pronouns she/zie and her/hir for hirself, but also said:
“I care which pronoun is used, but people have been respectful to me with the wrong pronoun and disrespectful with the right one.
It matters whether someone is using the pronoun as a bigot, or if they are trying to demonstrate respect.”In a statement at the end of hir life, Leslie said zie/she had
“never been in search of a common umbrella identity, or even an umbrella term, that brings together people of oppressed sexes, gender expressions, and sexualities”
and added that she/zie believed in the right of self-determination for oppressed individuals, communities, groups, and nations.
[End quote]
Feinerg novel Stone Butch Blues, "is widely considered in and outside the U.S. as a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender."
Feinberg made PDF copies of hir novel available free, online. You can download it (or order an at-cost print copy) here: www.lesliefeinberg.net
Just wanted to say clearly that I'm totally behind the idea that sharing pronouns in groups shows a sort of "I'm Spartacus" solidarity with trans and gender nonconforming people:
"I stand with whoever faces the biggest risks in pursuit of freedom for us all."What I can't get behind is the vinegarish, policey feel of groups that pressure everyone to give their pronouns, and how people go along so they fit in, not necessarily because they agree.
I suppose you could say that that social pressure is a good thing, it's how we exert group pressure on one another to Do Good, to Behave Well--it's the mechanism behind manners and civility, and healthy behaviors such as wearing masks.
I suppose. But the thing is, while I do love the overall aims of the gender revolution (to loosen bonds), I also have some questions about the methods; and I've seen that questioning is seen as (possibly) traitorous, and gets shut down, and that is NOT good.
Like when my dental hygenist told me she was unsure about Harry Potter because J K Rowling was anti-trans (which she isn't, she just questioned some aspects of it).
OMG.
So, I'm just not keen on the group-think aspect of it.
LET'S TALK, PEOPLE! (I know there's a lot of talk going on too.)
On the other hand, when I see the hateful responses to gender freedoms, ("We'll crucify you all" in Spartacus--and they really mean--and do--physical violence, not social disapproval),
I'm definitely happy to stand and give my pronouns.
What I should/want to do is resist the group think, and take my lumps (social discomfort) for doing so.
And at MY workplace, that means bringing up the question of gender and pronouns!
II. Age
River asked about the server at the hip café calling my older women friends and me ladies, "What is wrong with being called 'ladies'?"
Exactly.
My point was that the server calling us by a gendered term (ladies) points out a generation gap:
The server was young and I doubt she would have used such a term with her own age cohort, because that--gendering someone––is seen as wrong.
Like that sign I see in some places like this café:
"Please address staff by gender neutral terms."
I expect it was just a slip on this server's part, but what it illustrated for me was that young people don't see older people as being in their camp, or as being like them.
Calling older women "ladies" is ...mmm... well, it can be polite, but it can also be condescending. "Aren't you cute old things, out of the political loop."
There is sometimes an age divide in feminist attitudes toward gender.
Which, right now, is not the question dearest to my heart.
My workplace may be behind the curve with re-imagining gender, but we're REALLY behind the curve with recycling:
Aside from paper and metal, we recycle nothing.
III. Climate Don’t Care
I've tried to find a way to get recycling going at work, but the management won't pay for organic recycling, so we throw away huge amounts of food (including rotting or squashed leftovers from food give-aways, etc.).
I asked someone about neighborhood gardens taking our food for composting, and they said it was possible, but I never pushed and made it happen.
Susan Art Sparker sent me this, from Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016):
"Climate change has not been a significant political issue... instead political energy has increasingly come to be focused on issues that relate... to identity: religion, caste, gender rights, and so on."So, again, I WISH we would discuss and debate gender and identity, yes, those are good things that matter. And they COULD go hand in hand with changes in how we use carbon (cars, garbage, etc.)
So, it's complicated. Lotsa X-factors. And it's interesting. Lotta stories out there. I like that, uncomfortable though it can be.
Enter the story!
More to come, but first, an update: The staff meeting this morning was good!
Whew. You just never know.
Big
Boss invited everyone to talk about how they felt about the situation
with people living/dealing by the store for four months until the cops
chased them away a couple weeks ago (the people are literally two blocks
away now).
It was good to air feelings about it. Our meetings
are so short, there's not time for discussion, and I think that's
weirdly helpful.
People have to speak briefly, and there's no time for responses--sort of (accidentally) like 12 Step meetings.
People's
responses were varied--everyone's relieved that we don't have to wade
through blasted people and traffic, but most people are concerned that
nothing changed, there was no real HELP.
Before the meeting, in
the breakroom I'd said I wanted to talk about pronouns at the meeting.
"Let's put it on the agenda," I said.
I WAS JOKING, (there is no agenda), but the response in the breakroom was interesting.
Big Boss obviously resents having to do the pronoun introduction.
He said that he just says, "My name is ___" and doesn't give his pronouns.
I
am with him-- not because I'm opposed to pronoun switcheroos--I think
mix-and-match is GREAT---but because I want the Naming of Pronouns to be
a choice, not an obligation, not a Test of Political With-it-ness.
If it was a test of with-it-ness, I would say half my coworkers failed. LOL.
But they were honest, not pretending to toe the line.
I
wish gender were no big deal. I saw a bathroom signs... now, where...?
Oh--yeah, in Burrito Union in Duluth--their bathroom signs say:
WE DON'T CARE.
I don't care either. I will call you whatever you want.
But I sense it wasn't that Big Boss "doesn't care" so much as that he doesn't like something about the gender stuff---not sure what. (I can guess.)
I
probably shouldn't probe further--I might well not like what I
discover. It felt like a tense subject with him. I was laughing, but he
wasn't.
But
some other folks had fun with it, though, including Ass't Man, who'd
had a great trans coworker at a previous job who was happy to talk to
Asst Man all about the whats and whys and wherefores.
COMMUNICATION.
That's the thing.
The other thing Big Boss said was that people should think about setting aside time to do a special project during their shift.
This is SUCH a good idea.
Otherwise there is always too much to do--you have to block out your time and ignore the flood of donations to do anything.
My old friend: Set Your Intentions.
I
had already intended to do an October/ Halloween rearrange &
display. I have been neglecting displays, feeling overwhelmed with
incoming books, and I think it's a mistake.
BELOW: I can't believe that ceramic aardvarky thing (next to the papier-mache giraffe) hasn't sold.
I marked it down from $1.99 to .99.
Mysteries often have orange & red covers anyway, so this section was a breeze:
Not visible below--a pile of ten Playboy magazines from 1991, hidden on the bottom shelf of Cool Old Books, priced 99 cents each.
Customers complain if there's anything racy on display, but I didn't want to throw these out. The nudity, such as it is, is stupid and objectifies women, yeah, but it's so mild, it's like what's on billboards now. And the articles truly are interesting--an interview with Spike Lee, for instance.
I'm hoping someone will buy all ten at once---and quickly, and no one will even see them to complain.
I complain about not having learned new things.
Then I need to learn new things, and I complain.
Ha.
In fact, I've learned a ton in the past couple years--haven't we all, at some level?––but mostly experientially for me, not so much by book learning...
I. Background Research
Now I have/need/want to study... for our upcoming city elections.
We will vote on three charter amendments:
to allow rent control;
to replace the
police department with a public safety department;
and to give the
mayor more power (than the city council).
Daughter of a father who taught political science whines,
I don't wannnnnnnna....
But yeah, I do.
(I shall reward myself with looking for cute GIFs.)
DEFINITELY I want us to re-form (replace, whatever) the police!
Murdering bastards. ("Not all of them." No, of course not.)
But who has the best ideas, and how could that happen?
How can I judge which candidates (for mayor & city council) have good plans?
I must study up.
Sister sent me this Atlantic article, to start: "How to Actually Fix America's Police".
"Elected officials need to do more than throw good reform dollars at bad agencies."
For myself (and other locals):
Naomi Kritzer writes sci-fi, . . . but also poli-sci about Minnesota elections: she provides weblinks and analysis on her blog.
Downtown Plymouth Congregational Racial Justice Initiative (RJI) is hosting discussions on the amendments over three Thursdays and posting them on their site. The first one is up:
plymouth.org/act/advocate/rji
(Plymouth is a big, wealthy church that does good social work, but are they ever white.
Not their speakers––they invite and PAY great speakers from across the board––but the RJI's stated first goal?
It's "to deepen our personal awareness of white advantage in systemic racism".
Really? Do people of color need to deepen their awareness of white advantage?
This is a club for Nice White People.
I'm a nice white person, but I don't want to hang out with nice white people who can't figure out what's coming out of their mouths.
That's the NORM. I hardly need exposure to more of it.
In other matters...
The number of girlettes here has magically increased.
"We are not too many," they say, but a few of the dolls are peeling off to have adventures on their own.
They love it!
Last week, two went with a woman and her daughter at the store--regular customers––and another has just gone to live in South Carolina.
Here she is on the bus going to the post office. She is excited:
"I'm going to live with a parrot," she says. (True.)
I've had a couple days off work. I'm condo/cat sitting this week, and on purpose I didn't see or hardly talk with anyone on my days off, except the mammogram staff (and the cat). It was pretty great, aside from a few moments of panic (I'M ALONE).
I had to remind myself, "It's all right to feel uncomfortable."
And then I settled in and read the condo-owners New Yorkers.
III. "Don't Engage"
Today it's back to work--we're having a staff meeting this morning.
I'd actually suggested we have one again, so we can see one another, all together-- but I'm wary now that management has actually set one up.
Why? What nonsense are they going to hand down?
Maybe it's just a check-in. That would be welcome.
My workplace veers from no-management to heavy-handed pronouncements from the top. Heavy handed, and not necessarily broadly well-informed. Big Boss's management model is Moses.
My Cashier Friend with the PhD tells me she's been too depressed to read anything in years.
Some read murder mysteries.
Mr Furniture is visionary, but not political.
Sometimes I LOVE being in this back-water. I never have to discuss pronouns with people! Can I just sit this one out?
In fact, I am sometimes relegated to the back anyway.
The other day at a hip café where the staff wear pronoun pins, one young server called me and my two coworkers--all of us around sixty years old--ladies.
"Can I get you ladies anything else?"
Yep.
Age remains a big, big barrier.
Hm. I see I am definitely feeling touchy and impatient.
Two days off did not change that.
I would skip this meeting except I was pointedly told about it (and I did request a meeting, after all...).
Maybe it'll be fine--I do love my coworkers, as individuals.
Let me set my dials to...
INTENTION: Woo-sah, & stay well back.
Penny Cooper says, Think about something else, think about nice things.
Paint-on-paper design of one of the Penguin music score covers by Elizabeth Friedlander, which I posted earlier--
Also: "During WW2 [Elizabeth Friedlander] worked for the Political Intelligence Department in London, where amongst other things she forged Wehrmacht and Nazi Party rubber stamps."
Below, this is Cleome, the cat I am sitting---she loves being brushed and pushes her head against the comb if you hold it steady in front of her.
Being on the shore of Lake Superior was restorative, as always.
But because autumn leaves = high tourist season, all the cheap motels in town were booked, and Marz and I stayed in a Tiny House airbnb in the woods, 30 miles from the lake.
Driving there through the tidy, touristy area, Marz commented that it was like a setting for a Hallmark movie.
Oh no.
Hallmark movies frighten me.
Behind all those mittened hands cradling mugs of steaming hot chocolate I always imagine the Stepford Wives or Get Out.
Ice tea on a rustic patio? RUN!!!
"Those who fly the flag have said it stands for solidarity and professional pride within a dangerous, difficult profession and a solemn tribute to fallen police officers.I can imagine how people who live comfortably in fairly affluent, homogenous places that jibe with the dominant culture like this Family Village can see places like George Floyd Square as monstrous, and the people there as barbarians who the upright police have no option but to pin down.
But it has also been flown by white supremacists, appearing next to Confederate flags..."
--"The Short, Fraught History of the 'Thin Blue Line' American Flag"
A fresh new month, and I'm glad of it. It was hot and humid this past week--today it's nice and cool--suitable for October.
I go condo & cat sitting today, for ten days.
I'm glad of that too.
I've been busy since my auntie Vi died Sept. 10––I wanted distractions, but I still feel crabby and impatient and I think it'll be good to have time alone with nothing to do but catch up with feelings and get bored with myself.
I took home a couple stuffed animals from my auntie's, and bink took one too--here they are sitting with my girlettes and Red Bear on Vi's stoop, waiting to go in the car.
