On Becoming Californian

Wood smoke, historically, has evoked for me a sense of peace and quiet, safety, even… a snug cabin in the snowy woods, a pile of leaves after we’ve had our fill of jumping, the sweet sparks and embers soft and reassuring.

This smoke is different. It clogs the city sky, and assaults the lungs. There is no welcome crackle, no reassuring glimpse of modest flame contained. The city reeks. The sun is veiled, shadows gone. This is not our smoke, it is not our fire, but we feel its killing impact all the same, as overhead, wretched residue from forests, homes and vineyards tries to make it from the valley to the sea.

Meandering through the Sonoma hills only weeks ago, it was with a tourist’s eye that I admired the abundant grapes still on the vine, small towns with wooden clapboards, horses on the hills. I felt a guest on some one else’s land and history, a lucky stranger in a sunny haven that did not yet feel anything like home. This week, I watch on television the speed with which that charming landscape has been leveled and I feel for the first time a real Californian, worried about my neighbors to the north.  I turn on the local news now, and scan interactive maps to revisit the gentle hills and valleys whose names I have only just learned, whose landscape felt so foreign only weeks ago. I talk to near-strangers in my Tai Chi class about the smoke in our collective city lungs and the friends who have lost houses. Here, everybody knows somebody affected by the fire - even me - and we don’t know what to do.

How does tragedy transform us from strangers into neighbors? Why does such danger make one feel more vested in a place? How long would I have dangled on the outskirts of this landscape looking in, but for this yellow, choking sky? I don't know, but today, I am on my way to becoming Californian, attuned to the dangers in the wind, and worried about my new compatriots, caught in the fires just beyond these hills. 

I Hear You

Yesterday on the floor of the Minnesota House of Representatives, in a surprisingly frank statement, the Minority Leader chastised her “white male” colleagues for playing cards instead of listening to her female colleagues’ comments on an important issue – the right of citizens to protest in the streets. The ensuing exchange was captured and placed on YouTube. Instead of a gracious recognition of Representative Hortman’s frustration, the video shows a male colleague, obviously distressed, rising and asking her to apologize. But she doesn’t. She says that she’s tired of watching her male counterparts ignore the relatively few females – particularly women of color - in the legislature, mirroring the language I’ve been hearing lately from Black people weary of explaining to whites the concept and implications of their privilege. Congressman Dettmer replies, “I forgive you,” instead of offering the more gracious and hopeful response: “I hear you.” Undoubtedly he will be both yelled at and praised on social media for his part in this unfortunate confrontation. So will Representative Hortman. Undoubtedly, the controversy will escalate over the coming days. But sadly, what’s lost in all this is the chance to examine and solve the complex issues that lie just below the surface. How can we fix the divide if we don’t talk about it… if we don’t listen?

In the US Senate this week, we are about to lose one of the last hopeful signs that our country can be made better through the sharing of ideas, compromise, and the search for real solutions that render government both reasoned and manageable. Real governing has been lost in the cacophony of the times. “It’s their fault for being too political,” both parties cry as, between the two of them, they make inevitable the ‘nuclear option’ that will cement what already is true – no one is listening to each other, and as a result, good governing – and citizenship – disintegrates before our eyes. Common decency is a victim, too.

Surely, our new Insulter-in-Chief has instigated and eggs on much of the fear and incivility that has driven us into separate corners so full of fear and righteous anger. But he would never have been elected if the problem did not already exist. He just gave us the permission and impetus to get louder and less forgiving in our beliefs and language. Rural Americans feel left out of economic prosperity and looked down upon by “elitist” city dwellers; conservatives call the poor ‘lazy’ and ‘entitled’; liberals fear their country is taking dangerous steps toward autocracy and ruin, yet they exacerbate their entrenchment by subscribing to a FaceBook page called ‘Too informed to Vote Republican.’ Meanwhile, immigrants are vilified and scared; and a large contingent of our population continues to remind us, with very limited success, that Black lives matter, too.

The many rifts exposed by the 2016 election and their consequences do not bode well for America, and I fear they will be magnified by the ubiquity and immediacy of social media and ‘fake news’. Yesterday’s video from Minnesota shows just how far we have to go. It is too easy to dismiss – and even avoid - those we disagree with, too tempting to shoot off an insult, instead of showing empathy and offering hope.

I am no saint or impartial bystander. Like everyone else, I have an idea of who’s right and who’s wrong in these political and philosophical debates, and I’m more determined than ever to be vocal about it. I owe it to the many people who have neither the privilege nor the voice that I do. I owe it to my grandchildren who will, I’m afraid, inhabit a world far different than my own. I am distressed, however, to find my own rhetoric becoming less civil as I feel overwhelmed by the reckless behavior that is passing for governing in these dark days. “If ‘they’ can be blunt and uncivil, well then, so can I.”

This video is a microcosm of the problem before us; and it reminds me to retrieve my better self and say, “I hear you,” to both sides, even when I strongly disagree with one of them.  I have already sent a postcard and a tweet to Representative Hortman commending her bravery in speaking truth to power, and I was tempted to send equally brief missives to Representative Dettmer, chastising him for his insensitivity. But instead, I think I’ll write a longer letter to both – without angry words or shaming – that respects where each is coming from and asks them to govern well and listen to each other... to do it for the sake of our grandchildren.

Nevertheless, I Plan to Persist

I've been having trouble getting through on Washington phone lines for the daily calls I've vowed to make, and people keep telling me that email is not effective, so I went to Office Max yesterday to buy a stack of postcards on which to contact my government officials the old fashioned way - by mail.

The guy behind the counter looked at me like I was crazy. "We don't sell blank postcards anymore. We custom print them to order. What would you like your postcards to say?"

"No," I answered. "I want a stack of empty postcards so I can write to the White House and Congress every day."

"Ah, I get it," the guy wiggled his eyebrows and pointed me to the closest things to postcards on the shelf - index cards in neon colors - while he described the nude protest rally in Chicago he'd read about over the weekend. He looked like a large and gentle biker, a narrow braid down the middle of his beard. We shook our heads and bonded over index cards.

Then I went to get stamps. "Just out of curiosity, do you sell blank, stamped postcards?" I asked the lady at the post office when it was my turn. "Yes we do, but we sell them singly, and keep them behind the counter," she answered. Okay. Seems strange, but who knows what might happen if postcards were actually out in the open and in bulk? 

"I need lots of them," I said. "I want to write to the White House every day."

The woman looked at me blankly. "I'm sorry, what did you say?" she asked. "To be honest, I was thinking about something else - about where I left my shoes in the back room, actually. I can't remember where I took them off...."

"That's okay," I laughed. "I'll just take a roll of postcard stamps." I handed over my credit card and looked back apologetically to the long line listening in.

I took my booty home and set it out where it would be handy as I read the morning news online.

Today I opened the package of index cards and sent a note to Jason Chaffetz, head of the House Oversight Committee. I wrote that, as good as he was at investigating Clinton over small indiscretions, he should find investigating Trump's whoppers easy - the refusal to release his taxes, his myriad conflicts of interest, his insecure phone, and Trump's strange and disturbing relationship with Russia should all be a piece of cake; and I wrote to Mitch McConnell to say that history would judge him poorly if he stalled on an investigation into the president's Russian connections and if he didn't stand up for the legislative branch and the Constitution. Phew. I sent out a few emails, too, just for good measure, and then put the postcards in the mailbox. Just now the carrier picked them up and started them on their journey.

I don't know if my cards will get to their intended targets in sufficient time to do any good or whether anyone will even read them. I don't know if my words carry any weight at all. I don't know if I can make a difference to anyone but myself by speaking my outrage out loud at Office Max, the post office, or the halls of Congress - the role of active citizen is new to me, the effort to climb out of my comfort zone is daunting. Nevertheless, with so much at stake, I cannot justify doing less. So I plan to pick up that pen and lick that stamp every morning until we have a grown-up in the White House. In spite of my discomfort, I plan to persist.