What are paramilitaries? See ICE.

As a rookie journalist, I hovered on the edge of an enraged crowd. I’d dressed in nondescript clothing and tucked a little cash and my ID into an inside pocket. That’s how I could walk into a far-right, racist crowd that had just beaten another journalist to a pulp on national TV and try to blend in.

Armed thugs on motorcycles circled, scanning the crowd for people like me. I stood near a cluster of men, near enough to be mistaken for a hanger on. They looked me over. I looked at my feet and glanced toward one of the men talking nearby. They moved on.

Once I’d gathered enough data to be able to write my report about the far-right demonstration, I started back toward the little hotel where I was staying. This was tricky because my lodging was in a multicultural part of town, and if those who watched the crowd saw me heading in that direction, my cover could be blown in an instant. Even so, I walked with purposeful strides and forced myself not to glance around or look nervous.

Creative Commons image by Steve Thompson of flickr.com

I was at the foot of a bridge, almost safe, when I heard the enormous crash from the legislative building a few blocks away—glass shattering, what sounded like furniture being hurled from a window and the crowd screaming in a mix of rage and delight. Everyone was turned toward the noise; no one was looking at me. I quickened my pace.

I made it to the middle of the bridge before the machine guns opened fire. Dozens of men in the crowd had semi-automatic rifles that they fired into the air. The sound was like nothing I’ve heard before or since, tapping into primal terror at the core of my being.

Like the chatter of a rattlesnake, that thundering sound was a warning of imminent violence. I ran like hell that night, knowing the nationalist crowd would be on my heels, headed into our multicultural neighborhood to terrorize the minority populations. I reached the entrance of my tiny hotel just as the manager was chaining up the door. He let me slip in beside him, and we heard shots ricochet down the street no more than two seconds later.

That far-right crowd sacked the national legislature and then rioted through a multicultural district destroying property and killing those they found on the street. But instead of being punished, the thugs with those military-style weapons were pardoned and then deputized to deal with supposed “terrorists” in the population, meaning the country’s largest minority. The next few months were marked by violence and terror. As a journalist, I tried to report on the chaos, gathered anecdotal evidence about the families being brutalized and tried to explain to folks back home.

I’ve adapted some of the terminology in this account to American terms, but all of the facts are absolutely true. It was a nationalist riot that sacked the legislature. No one used the term “far-right” there, but that’s what it was. The neighborhood I lived in was called multi-ethnic, rather than multicultural. The deputized thugs were called “paramilitaries” in the international press.

That’s because that was Macedonia, the last war of the breakup of Yugoslavia. It was a country where we expect things like a mob that sacks a legislature and is rewarded with weapons and informal authority to terrorize minorities. In that context, we expect terms like “paramilitaries.”

Listening to the news these days—hearing about a US Senator being forced to the ground and the Controller of the City of New York cuffed and detained by unmarked, masked men without any judicial authority beyond the informal blessing of a nationalist leader, hearing about a pregnant woman, a US citizen, brutally arrested simply because of the color of her skin, hearing about families being rounded up, children torn from their parents’ arms, about people detained in cold or overheated and viciously crowded conditions with little food or water, about sick children taken from their home and country, listening to my neighbors fearfully trade tips on where the paramilitaries were last scene locally, I get flashbacks to that war.

And I understand that we really need to start using the same words we use for these things when they happen in other countries.

When it happens in the Balkans, we call it ethnic cleansing. When the government hands out guns and power to men without uniforms who were previously involved in an insurrection and tells them to get rid of the riffraff, we call them “paramilitaries” and what they do is “kidnapping.” The same words should be used when the same things happen here.

I understand the feeling of dislocation because those things are not supposed to happen here. In truth, such things shouldn’t happen anywhere.

The primary disconnect I encounter, even among people who are dismayed by the heinous policies of the Trump administration, is the constant waiting for when it will “get really bad.” As far as I can tell, that means we’re waiting for a time when life on our streets looks like the set for a WWII Hollywood movie. Then, people say, they’ll be willing to stop business as usual and really do something more than go to the occasional protest. Too many people seem to think we should stay calm and keep on with daily routine unless we see tanks in the streets and clouds of debris on the horizon.

If we do see those sights, it will be much too late to take action. And for most people, even in recognized war zones, things look deceptively normal most of the time. The morning after that mob stormed through our neighborhood in Macedonia, I went out to get a good look at the rubble. Storefronts of minority owned businesses had been smashed. But within a few days that was cleared away.

We lived with the presence of paramilitaries for months, but you rarely saw them, just like with ICE today. They’d show up sporadically. People were afraid but also felt like they might be overreacting. You heard about this or that terrible case a few towns over. There were roads known to be watched by snipers. We drove on them anyway, rolling down our car windows to minimize shattering glass if the vehicle was hit, and yelling to raise our courage. And mostly we got through.

That was war. In areas where the ethnic minorities were a majority, they banded together and resisted. No one internationally thought they were unjustified in using violence to defend their neighborhoods. The nationalists called them terrorists, but the international press said they were just defending their families. The US briefly sent troops to rescue some of them.

The situation in the US right now is being significantly downplayed both by most people who simply haven’t been touched by it personally and by the international press. And the underlying reason for all of this hasn’t even been mentioned.

Let’s consider why there is this sudden enormous push to secure the southern border and deport immigrants. Immigration rates haven’t changed dramatically in recent years. Yes, there are immigrants, just as there were 50 years ago. They still come from the same areas and they still do the same jobs, providing much of the agricultural and sanitation labor in the US. What, other than nationalist scapegoating, has truly changed?

The climate changed. Yes, I mean that literally. The actual climate is changing.

This massive push around immigration—which exploits the proclivities of the far-right, but is actually manufactured by think tanks, right-wing media and the wealthy class of conservative power brokers—is the tell that the intelligencia of the right-wing have accepted that climate change is real. They may still put out disingenuous media playing to the science-denialism of their less educated foot soldiers, but they have accepted its reality. That’s why it is worth it to them to round up the immigrant workforce that makes money for them, detain them and deport many of them.

They can see what is coming. More and more of the immigrants and refugees these days are fleeing climate disaster and climate-fueled violence. Severe drought from global heating affects the attitudes nearer to the equator more intensively than it does more moderate zones. This has made some areas of Central America, northern Africa and the Middle East essentially uninhabitable, especially if you’re poor and lack air-conditioning. At these levels, even just the heat is deadly, let alone the lack of water to grow crops.

And that, of course, puts added stress on already impoverished areas, leading to increased political instability and violence. And it will get worse. As the climate crisis accelerates, thanks to the obstruction and obfuscation of the wealthy and corporations in the US and other “developed” nations, human migration will inevitably increase.

If the current substantial trickle of immigrants and refugees at the US southern border feels flood-like, this is nothing compared to what we are likely to see in the future. As areas nearer to the equator become hotter and drier, people will be forced to watch their families die in desperate misery or risk the violent and perilous crossing. And that is not a choice. There will only be the dividing factor between those who lack the strength to keep striving to live a little while longer and those who give up and die. That’s all.

The migration of humans from uninhabitable zones will not stop. It will grow in the next decade, likely to unprecedented levels. And the current use of ICE as paramilitaries is a response to that. It is also a strategy to desensitize the US population to as-of-yet-unseen levels of brutality and depravity in our country.

What ICE is doing is terrible, but I am concerned that it is actually meant to accustom us to violence against immigrants in preparation for far worse.

An expat and a refugee: The fellowship of dissent, exile and the defense of distant homelands

I first met Ahmad in March 2003 on a narrow street shining with rainwater in the deceptively unassuming castle district of Prague a few blocks from Saddam’s embassy.

He was wrapped in a gray raincoat and almost shockingly diminutive. I’d been told I was meeting the head of a local Iraqi dissident organization, and I expected someone a little more substantial. When he turned toward me, his face was one of those that stays handsome decades beyond youth, thin and well-angled, with wrinkles that enhance rather than detract. But I instantly felt his fear.

Saddam Hussein was still in power in Iraq, and a US invasion for the purpose of “regime change” was clearly imminent. Since Ahmad was willing to help antiwar Americans, I’d also kind of assumed he felt completely safe from Saddam’s regime here in Central Europe. It was another preconception I got wrong.

“I’ve lived here for 20 years, and I’ve never been this close to that embassy.” Ahmad’s first words to me were in flawless Czech with a slight Arabic accent that also enhanced rather than detracted from his words.

I instantly recalibrated my approach. This would take tact and empathy. Not that I’d been planning on not being empathetic. But I’d been expecting to get right into the plan and the politics. But Ahmad plunged into the personal and the stuff I would have been afraid to bring up across the cultural divide.

Image of a prague street at night, cobblestones underfoot and ancient stone arches above a small group of people walking through the light from an open doorway - Creative commons image by david seibold of flickr.com

He’d been a young anti-Saddam resistance fighter back in the 1980s at a time when the US was backing Saddam’s regime. He wasn’t Muslim, he pointed out, but rather part of a small Aramaic minority. He’d barely survived when the resistance was pulverized and sent scattering across heavily armed borders. He’d lain in a ditch just a few feet from guys with machine guns who knew he was out there and who would get a bounty if they killed him. They just didn’t happen to look down, so he lived.

Eventually, he’d made it to Turkey and was given the choice of several Soviet-bloc countries where he could get asylum and start his life over--alone, without family or anything more than his technical school education. He had to go to the Soviet bloc because an enemy of Saddam was, at the time, an enemy of the United States.

He told me he chose Czechoslovakia because his resistance cell used to meet in a brewery started by a Czech expat who lived in Iraq for a while. That was all he had to go on. The Czechs have good beer.

Now, it was 2003, the Soviet Union had fallen, Czechoslovakia was no more, the Czechs were in NATO and the United States had changed their tune about Saddam. I could tell Ahmad’s take on the politics of the situation was at best “complicated.” I didn’t blame him. On that first day, we could at least agree that his family was stuck in Iraq and facing the “shock and awe” tactics of the US military and that was not okay. We also both agreed that Saddam really sucked, but that a foreign invasion wasn’t going to help the local political situation.

With that rudimentary sense of common ground, we started an alliance between Czech, American and international antiwar groups and the Iraqi refugees in Prague. There were not many places where antiwar groups had that kind of friendship with the Iraqis. I don’t know if all the Iraqi dissident groups listened and gave the benefit of the doubt to antiwar westerners the way Ahmad did, but I know for a fact that a lot of ultra-focused antiwar activists didn’t dial right down to empathy. Maybe that was why we were different.

We held a protest in front of the Iraqi Embassy that day and then marched to the US Embassy to register our opposition to war plans. We were saying no to war and to authoritarianism by both the US and Iraqi regimes. We were making clear that opposition to the war did not mean support for Saddam’s tyranny.

Later, there were long evenings in Prague wine cellars, where I’d sit next to Ahmad while Czech activists yelled across the table and haggled about which political parties should be allowed to show their symbols at our antiwar rallies. They all wanted Ahmad there. He was a great symbol, but he rarely got a word in with his quiet voice and unassuming stature.

In one such cellar, he finally asked me. “Why are you doing this?”

We’d been over his reasons quite a few times. But I’d just assumed he understood mine. I must have gaped at him a moment too long because he clarified, “At the rally, you said you aren’t a pacifist.”

I had said that in a speech, explaining why Americans abroad were against the war. I’d said that even if one believes some wars are just, this one surely was not. We had plenty of evidence that the “weapons of mass destruction” thing was overblown propaganda. I’d gone on about civilian casualties and soldiers coming home in body bags. But apparently this hadn’t satisfied Ahmad’s curiosity.

Fair enough. Why did I care? I didn’t have any relatives in the military or in harm’s way? Why was I spending all of my spare time organizing protests against this war? He also knew I wasn’t in any political party, given my stance in the Czech inter-party debates. It was a fair question.

“I’m fighting for my country, for our democracy,” I told him. “The underlying issue is that this war and everything that’s happened since 9/11 has changed my country—America. It’s turned it into a hateful state, a surveillance state and largely a police state. Our democracy was never perfect, but this war and the Patriot Act and the rest of it is threatening what democracy we have. Sure, I care about people in Iraq. I don’t want your people to die. That’s just wrong, and I’d do what I can to stop it in any country. But yes, the reason I’m so committed, the reason I’m doing this every day, all day, sacrificing everything else to it, is because I’m afraid for my country too. We probably won’t lose militarily. But we may well lose our democracy and our freedom in this war.”

He listened but didn’t say whether he agreed with me.

Ahmad and I marched side by side at the head of a lot of antiwar demonstrations over the next two years. And he never questioned me again. There were times when we trusted each other with dangerous situations. We stood up for each other whenever there was need. If the Czech Communists came after me, he’d have my back and they would back down in the face of his moral authority. If the international activists criticized him for giving complex answers and being glad when Saddam fell a few months into the war, I defended his right to have complicated interests.

A few months into the occupation, Ahmad’s brother was driving his car in Iraq and was shot and killed by American soldiers. They later admitted it was a case of mistaken identity. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He was just one more civilian killed with impunity. Ahmad called me in tears. I couldn’t believe I was one of the first people he told about this.

I was shaken by my own complicated emotions. It was terrible. I felt guilty, complicit and as if he’d have every reason to hate me as an American. At the same time, I was honored that he called me, and I overwhelmingly admired his sense of fairness and forgiveness in the midst of grief.

We got through that moment. And eventually the protests died down though the endless war dragged on, and Americans and Iraqis continued to die in senseless, unnecessary and brutal ways. Once Ahmad brought his wife and daughter to my home for a potluck. But I could feel him pulling away. I worried that I reminded him of very painful things. I invited him to events, but he rarely accepted. Eventually, we drifted apart for 20 years.

The other day, a notification popped up on my Facebook, a request from an account with a non-Latin alphabet. I hit the “delete” button before I even had a chance to register it. Then, a second later, I realized the script hadn’t been Hindi or Chinese, like a lot of spam, but Arabic. And I can still sort of read Arabic, picking out letters like a first grader. So, I spent ten minutes struggling to undo my delete and get the notification back. Something, some intuition or the first letter, that tall straight Arabic letter A at the beginning of the name nagged at me.

And then, there he was, his full name and his photo--still the same ageless face, hardly seeming older at all, though by now he must be in his sixties. I sent him a friend request back and hoped against hope that he’d respond even though I’d deleted his request. We hadn’t had Facebook back in 2003-2005.

A few days later my phone rang with the weird electronic beeping that heralds an app call rather than a cell call. And there was Ahmad, my old friend. His voice was the same as always, comforting and kind with his lilting accent utterly unchanged. I’ve changed so much that I doubt he could conceive of my life now--half a world away in the US, going to graduate school and living by scavenging with two teenage kids and a broken marriage.

I was on deadline and didn’t really have the time, but we talked for over an hour anyway, sketching out twenty years for each other and mostly not talking politics.

I did ask him at one point, “Do you believe me now? This--what’s happening in the US—surely, you see it. This is what I was talking about. Some of us saw the warning signs back then. I’m still fighting the same war.”

He agreed, but seemed stumped for words of comfort, much the way I had been all those years ago when it was his family on the line.

Fighting fascism: Democracy doesn't come easy

The rallies and marches for democracy across the United States on April 5 were absolutely amazing!

Consider what it takes for 5.2 million people to gather in public places in crowds at the same time, and have almost no incidents of disruption. There were counterprotests and MAGA provocateurs specifically trying to incite trouble, both in big cities and in small towns like ours.

But in almost all cases the organizers of the rallies and marches calmed these situations, using hard-won, conflict-mitigation techniques that many of us have been practicing for decades. In just our little town in Eastern Oregon, we put together a team of eight people tasked with keeping our crowd of 300 people calm and avoiding engagement with counter protesters. We had another team of just four people discouraging people from crossing streets against the lights. This was hard work, but people in the crowd listened to us, and we pulled it off without any incidents or injuries.

Even here, there were MAGA supporters who turned out with open-carry guns and large trucks burning tires to try to intimidate or provoke conflict. One driver sped through a crowded intersection and put many people at risk, but because of our careful traffic group, no one was in the street when they weren’t supposed to be, so no one was hurt. Another time, a driver forced their way onto a crosswalk against the light, while people who had the right-of-way were crossing. Our people stayed calm.

If this happened in a tiny, rural town, I can only imagine what it was like in larger cities, like New York, where crowds filled major avenues for 20 blocks and the police were largely absent. It was all on volunteers to keep the cross streets flagged and avoid traffic accidents. This isn’t simple. It takes training, and it didn’t happen overnight. This took huge coordination and a ton of hard work by thousands of volunteers.

And we’re going to have to do it again and again. This is not even close to over. We’re standing on one of those knife-edges of history. The United States will go fully fascist or it won’t. Even if we are headed for an authoritarian period, will there be lively community resistance or an intimidated and lethargic populace too beaten down by economic blows to push back? Those are the questions of our times.

As a journalist, I got to witness pivotal moments like this for some other countries, seeing some countries get sucked into totalitarian regimes and seeing others gain health care, stronger democratic systems and better safeguards than we have in the US. I’ve known for decades that American democracy was under threat and that we are not immune to coups or authoritarian tactics.

anti-fascist protest - image by Arie farnam

The philosophy of American exceptionalism has been a problem when it comes to the US doing military things overseas that we wouldn’t want other countries doing. But it’s also a problem when Americans think we won’t ever have coups or wars or authoritarianism because we are the definition of democracy. We don’t have a special destiny to be the greatest democracy. We have to fight for our democracy like everybody else.

Europe and Canada do have better health care, stronger democratic systems, better safeguards and less inequality, largely because they have updated their laws to face modern threats to democracy, such as massive corporations, billionaires and AI engines that can manipulate what people see on the internet. If we want to have what they have, save our democracy, prevent full-blown fascism and take back our country, we must accept that we are not immune or destined to be a great democracy.

We are now in a historic struggle for democracy. It will necessarily have many facets. Economic boycotts that target companies complicit in authoritarianism and abuses of democracy and human rights are part of it. Organizing, running for office, showing up to talk to legislators, as well as calling and writing to politicians will play a role. There may come a time when we can muster a general strike, the type of thing that has brought an end to political coups in other countries.

But massive demonstrations are still the backbone of a pro-democracy resistance to authoritarianism. Public events like this “demonstrate” undeniably the numbers of people who are willing to make personal sacrifices and take risks to demand rights and democracy. They also form community bonds.

The mainstream media tends to downplay demonstrations as merely “a way to send a message” to leaders, as if they are nothing more than another form of calling your representatives. But public rallies and marches do more than send a message and the message they send is more than the one most people think they are sending. It isn’t just about telling politicians, “please do X, Y and Z and stop doing A, B and C.” Many people may say these things in the crowd and be quoted as such in newspapers. That’s good and important. But the greatest message being sent—the message that can’t be denied with lies and spin—is the level of commitment the population has to broad topics or issues.

Extinction Rebellion made a big deal out of a statistic about 3.5 percent of the population rising up and that concept has spread to other protest movements today. The idea is that historically there is no instance in which more than 3.5 percent of the population became highly activated against a regime or for a major change and change did NOT come. Some people have taken this to mean that a small minority of the population could force a change, even on a recalcitrant majority. But that isn’t really what the statistic means.

The 3.5 percent is an estimate of what percent of a population has to be willing to go out to public rallies and protests regularly, especially in the face of repression, especially if it is dangerous or costs them inconvenience or risk. It is not because that 3.5 percent can change things all on their own. It is what those gatherings “demonstrate” about the level of commitment and vehemence in the population.

The US population has overwhelmingly supported progressive policies for decades. A significant majority of Americans have supported gun control, universal health care, education, reproductive rights and all kinds of other progressive policies for as long as I can remember. Those policies have not become law because of the anti-majoritarian elements of the US electoral system (such as the electoral college, gerrymandering and "lobbying” aka legalized bribery) as well as because of the corporate sponsorship of the two major parties.

Despite majority opinion being significantly at odds with policy for decades, no shift has come for a wide variety of reasons—lack of awareness, media obfuscation, apathy and hopelessness, prominent among them.

In addition, the population may hold those majority opinions but many people may not hold them strongly enough. Political and social scientists look at what happens when popular commitment to something rises in a population. When people are willing to make sacrifices or take risks for a set of needs or beliefs, even less democratic systems (such as authoritarian coups) can be overcome. That’s what the 3.5 percent rule is about.

And we are well on our way to seeing 3.5 percent or more of the population become engaged. But it isn’t enough for that number of people to come to one demonstration. It will require a longer commitment. It will require sacrifice and risk, because that would mean that a large majority of the population agrees with those who are out demonstrating, not just sort of agrees, but agrees vehemently and that more and more people are willing to lay down personal stakes to make a change. That is when even a less-than-democratic regime will change, whether it wants to or not.

I talk to friends in democratic countries in Europe regularly online, and they are really worried about us. They often say I’d better get out while I can, as if the US is one of those destabilized countries I used to report from. But the reality is that Putin is threatening my second country, the Czech Republic. If Ukraine falls, Europe will be fighting for their lives as much as they did in World War II.

These are the times we are living in—wherever we are. We never wanted it to come to this, but we are facing an authoritarian epoch. There are people being disappeared off the streets in this country for no crime greater than participating in a peaceful protest. Legal immigrants or citizens can officially be rounded up without due process if anyone “suspects” they may be undocumented. There are states where some of my neighbors, who are citizens, have been declared illegal because of medical and gender differences. Our civil service is being gutted and replaced by racist loyalists.

We are facing the fight of our lives. 

Last week before the big protests, there was a swarm of messages on social media, claiming to be “urgent safety information” about the protests. But it was actually lists of people who shouldn’t protest because they’d be at risk. This included immigrants—who really are at increased risk and we should be getting out there doubly to stand up for them—but also saying people of color shouldn’t protest, children should never come to protests (even those that are family friendly and have kids’ activities), and that people with any kind of medical condition or older people shouldn’t come to protests.

It became clear that these posts actually weren’t trying to help. They were being spread by some progressive accounts but also by accounts that were usually pro-MAGA. They started to spread things about turning your phone completely off—not communicating with anyone. There are protest strategies for people involved in civil disobedience that entail not using the internet or not even bringing a phone during specific direct actions. But having crowds of people in the streets without a means of communication helps no one but those who want chaos and violence.

In the end, the protests were peaceful and calm across the nation, amazingly so given the numbers. We saw a microcosm of it in our small town, with a few counterprotestors, some people attempting to intimidate. But we were lucky all around, and online reactions showed that local hardliners seriously underestimated the potential of these protests. In Baker County, the next county over, there was a somewhat smaller protest but they had 50, mostly armed, counterprotestors show up, likely because there was an article in their local paper about the protest a few days before.

That tells me that we too will soon face a lot more reactionary response. There are paramilitary groups all over this country, but especially in rural “red” counties like ours, that would like nothing more than to cause disruption and violence at anti-Trump events. We have a lot of work ahead. And there will likely come a time when just protesting isn’t enough. A general strike is a very likely necessity down the road and civil disobedience that entails real risks and personal sacrifices will be necessary if we want real change.

But with these tools and with the level of commitment that is palpable among us, we do now have the ingredients for change, possibly for change that will do more than just reverse the most recent atrocities. We could see change that repairs much more and allows us to truly join the “prosperous and democratic nations” of the world, at last.

Peeing by the side of the road and rock-bottom moments

Are you overwhelmed? OK, dumb question. It’s more like, “What particular things are overwhelming you just now?”  

Whether it’s family troubles, work pressures, relationship tensions, social strain, the state of the employment market or one’s specific industry, hectic household horrors or the political situation, there are plenty of things barraging us with stress. But it’s interesting to note that while everyone is apparently stressed, some are more stressed than others. 

I came face to face with that recently, while doing some literary research about memoirs. I wrote a memoir some years ago and even got a wonderful literary agent to represent it. She had a successful Manhattan literary practice with some big-name clients, so I was thrilled to sign with her. The way literary agents work is that they help you polish your work and find a publisher, and then they take a 15 percent cut of whatever you make.

Image of peeing outdoors by the intrepid Jennifer Brandel of Flickr.com

In this case, my agent worked on my book for four months—suggesting helpful changes and shopping it to 42 publishers. She said they all responded positively, and some said it was a gripping, amazing manuscript. But they all turned it down with some comment along the lines of, “But this author is completely unknown. We can’t publish a memoir by someone without any public platform.” This included a dozen small presses.  

My agent and I sadly parted ways because she had to work for clients that she could help make money. She never charged me a cent for all that work.  

But she left me with a lot of frustration and a desire to understand the business, so I started reading memoirs—all different kinds of memoirs. There are definitely some good ones out there, though I have to admit that the quality of memoir writing has declined in the past 20 years, in my opinion. There used to be memoirs published simply based on the enjoyment a reader could gain from a skillfully crafted true story. But now, the vast majority of recent memoirs must have some sort of public hook—the author was a bit famous (or wealthy) or they (or their topic) was recently part of a major news story or they have some key expertise about a topic that is in the news or they know someone who is famous, in the news or very wealthy.

Part of my problem is obviously not being in the right place at the right time and not running in the correct circles. My daughter says all I have to do is move to Hollywood. But I also admit that my life is to full to drop everything and crank out a book based on current events in a couple of weeks. Two years ago, had I dropped everything and written about my experiences in Eastern Ukraine, I might have actually stood a chance, though a slim one since I am still officially “a nobody” to the industry. 

What does get a memoir published today is work claiming to be the words of various celebrities. A lot of it is ghost written by professionals and while it isn’t scintillating reading, it’s basically literate. The issue I have with most of the memoirs being published these days isn’t some severe problem with technical quality. It’s the banal focus on the details of celebrity life that repeat again and again in book after book.

I’m not even going to name names, because frankly, these books are so boring they blend together and I don’t want to go back and figure out which book it was by which wealth-born celebrity actress, but one stuck out to me as a quintessential example. A moderately well-known Hollywood actress was telling her life story, including her dreams of acting when she was a teenager in her movie-industry family.  

She described the stresses and perils of teenage angst and self-doubt, the meetings with industry leaders and the nail-biting suspense of waiting for the decisions of casting directors her parents introduced her to. She often spoke to the reader about how to boost one’s own confidence and the need to “just stick to it until you reach your dreams.” Because if she could get through all those trials and tribulations on her road to stardom, surely, anyone can.  

I’ll admit that I would never have gotten that far in this book—research project or no research project—except that I was deep cleaning my house and listening to the audiobook version. I needed something fairly brainless to listen to and the ghost writer did have a pleasantly lilting way with words. But right around the time I was scrubbing my bathtub and had my hands in soap and goo, the book reached its “climax” of plot and tension.  

The actress was involved in last minute negotiations for her first big role and that required driving somewhere that crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains by car. She described this as a perilous journey and went into depth about her stress and last-minute anxieties as they drove. Then she told the driver she needed to find a suitable restroom, and there was some vague discussion of the fact that there was no appropriate place anywhere within many miles. I didn’t really catch whether or not a gas station was unavailable or simply unthinkable.  

But in the end, with the literary fan-fare of high drama, the actress was forced to squat behind a bush and pee on the side of the road. She gushed that she was sure such a thing would never happen to her readers in their struggles for success and assured us that while it was difficult, she did eventually recover. I actually suffered through the rest of the book because I could not quite believe that was the actual plot peak. But it was.  

The plot peak whether in fiction or in a memoir is often the lowest point for the protagonist, rock bottom in terms of reaching a goal or the height of stress. I think about how many people may be experiencing a dark night of the soul this winter. There are families hiding from ICE raids, trying to distract fearful children, or scrambling to make ends meet, to get basic groceries.

There are mother’s grieving still-born or miscarried children who are facing either life-threatening hemorrhages without medical care or legal sanctions or both, on top of their grief. There are young people on the edge of discovering their inner identity who are terrified to share their budding realization with their friends, family, school or counselor because of the negative things they’ve heard about LGBTQ people and now the highest authorities in the land have declared open season on hate.

There are scientists, not just climatologists, battling suicidal ideation because of the devastating reality that everything they’ve meticulously documented over a lifetime career is being tossed in the garbage, and we’re all headed for dystopia-level catastrophe as a result. There are thousands of people who went into public service as a career out of an idealistic belief that a bit of a pay cut compared to the private sector is worth doing work with purpose and heart, who have been summarily dismissed from their jobs or their jobs have ceased to exist overnight.

In my own life, I’ve had a few rock bottom moments over the past several years, so I can’t say that this is the worst moment for me personally. But it is a time of decision making, a turning point that might end up in a memoir as a moment when things reached the breaking point. I’m facing decisions about what I’ll do after I graduate from my MFA program and realizing that if I want to stay in Eastern Oregon and live a life close to the natural environment on my family’s land, I’ll have to accept that a long-standing pattern of bullying and psychological abuse is going to be part of the package. The alternative is striking out on my own to try to forge a completely new career at fifty years old in an economy and literary market that has never been more hostile to independent people pulling themselves up by their creativity straps.

On top of that, I’m watching every structure put in place to level the playing field a bit for people with disabilities be eroded and/or threatened with obliteration. I still remember what it was like not to have health coverage in the United States before Obama, and I have the permanently messed up shoulder to show for it.

Last December, I had surgery on my right eye to preserve my residual vision and it went well, but it did take the spunk out of me for about two weeks. I had scheduled it so that the aftermath would come during the holiday break, so it didn’t interfere with my graduate program. I’ve been so thankful for Medicaid and the access to top eye specialists it’s given me in the last few years. 

The surgeon was gung ho to go to work on the left eye as well, but I asked him to hold off for a school break. But as it turned out, he’s all booked spring break. We were about to decide to postpone it to next fall, because summer isn’t a good season for eye surgeries in general. Then the temporary freeze of Medicaid payment portals hit and the goal of ending Medicaid for people like me was explicitly voiced. A judge has stalled it, so that we still have coverage for the moment, but there’s no telling for how long. I called the clinic back and they said they were already in the process of scheduling my surgery for the middle of spring term. I’ll just have to hope the medical coverage lasts that long and cope with surgery and the high intensity MFA program at the same time. Not a lot of options left. 

The day after that, I got a letter from the insurance company denying coverage for the specialized corneal bandage the doctor had used to shield my eye from excruciating pain after the operation in December. Because it’s a fairly specialized item, it could easily cost upwards of a thousand dollars, more than my monthly income. I’m fighting the decision, of course, but it’s indicative of the times that such a basic thing as a bandage after surgery gets denied and people get threatened with bills that would strip them of the basics of survival. And that’s with Medicaid more-or-less intact.  

The only place I can really breathe deeply these days is on that little bit of land at the north end of the Grande Ronde Valley where I visit every weekend. I take long walks, now with my guide dog Conway, in the pine and fir woods and across the winter-brown ridge tops. It’s a place I can get away from the pressures, the bad news of the world, and increasingly, what feels like surveillance.  

We’ve all heard the stories or experienced that moment where you open your browser or Facebook and get barraged with ads for something you just briefly mentioned to a family member—something fairly obscure and specific that you’ve never actually searched for. There is no doubt that apps are using computer and phone microphones as well as devices for Siri, Alexa and the like to listen in and target ad campaigns based on overheard conversations. At this point, I’ve come to expect it. It’s one of the things I love about the very sketchy cell signal and wifi out at my family’s place. You really can be off-line and out of the eye of AI for a while.

But until now the intrusions seemed restricted to things typed into a search bar, or at most, spoken out loud within range of a microphone. Recently, I had a bizarre experience that challenged this assumption. My sheets got some dirt on them and I decided it was time to wash the whole kit and kaboodle. I stripped the bed and the duvet covers and the pillowcases and threw it all in the washing machine. Then I opened Facebook to check on a couple of groups while I waited. And there was a string of six different ads for new sheets and new duvet covers. The ads continued for two days.

I usually don’t get ads for sheets and duvet covers. Given my search and Amazon shopping histories I get stuff about camping, dogs, keto diets and weirdly medieval-looking wardrobe options. Most of the clothing ads actually aren’t even real. When I’ve tried to connect to a shop through those ads I’ve been bounced into regular clothing retailers, without the retro, Renaissance fair chic. I don’t even search for that stuff, but I’m guessing it’s my very eclectic search history that cues it up.  

The thing is that I never get ads for boring household stuff like sheets and duvet covers but for two days after I stripped my bed, I did. I never mentioned the dirt on the bed or the washing or anything until after all of this went down. So, targeted ads are just be part of the surreal world we’re living in this year.

And I’m not sure the weirdness is only happening in cyberspace. As I was returning from my latest walk across the ridge, I stopped at a flat spot between the cabin where I usually sleep and my parents’ house to let Conway do his thing. It had been a brisk two-mile walk, but he’s a good guide dog and generally won’t pee or poop while we’re out on a trail, so I had to make a point of stopping before we got inside. And I remember that the leash slipped out of my hand and I had to stoop to pick it up.  

After that, I went into the house and helped my mom with a few things, ate lunch and packed up stuff ready to go back to town. Because the internet is so sketchy out there and I didn’t happen to need a flashlight or a magnifying glass or a text reader or a calendar or the weather or an audiobook or my address book or an old recipe or any of the myriad other things I use my phone for, I didn’t notice that it was gone. Thinking back, I know it was supposed to be in the front pocket of a cloth bag I’d been carrying on our long ramble across the ridge, and afterwards, I recalled that I had taken the thermos out of that bag and noticed that it was completely empty, but the absence of the phone that should still have been in there didn’t occur to me then.  

As we were getting in the car though, I ran out to the cabin to get one last thing and on the way back, I felt the sudden strong urge to pee, though I’d already been to the bathroom in the house. The actress who had a ghost writer write that memoir would likely have been utterly shocked, but I didn’t think twice about squatting down to pee outdoors on that little flat spot near the top of the driveway where nobody but the winter birds and deer could see.  

And while I was peeing, I looked at the ground about two feet in front of me, since that is as far as I can see with my eyes.

It took me a few moments to register what I was seeing because it made no sense. There was my phone with the nice brown leather case, lying on the muddy brown carpet of leaves. I wouldn’t have been able to see it had I been standing or had it been even a foot or two further from my face. I could only see it because I squatted down right in that spot to pee. And it was in a very deep signal hole, so I wouldn’t have been able to call it either.

It was right there where I had stopped to let Conway pee an hour earlier, where I had stooped down to get the dropped leash and no doubt upended my bag just enough for it to fall out.

Some will say the ads for sheets and duvet covers is coincidence and corporations aren’t “that bad” with surveillance—yet. And many might say that me finding my brown phone in a pile of brown leaves while legally blind without even looking for it is just freak chance. And maybe it is. But I hope there is some balance in this universe. If the one really is corporate interests trying to squeeze out every cent they can, let the latter be some ancestor or kindly fae or an old god, some spirit looking out for me, because we are sure going to need some spiritual allies.

Resilience under the Solstice tree

Pumpkin Ridge Home fires buring - image by arie farnam

It took me a while to settle on what to write this full moon. There are certainly things happening that merit contemplation, but I’m mainly thinking of everyone out there, especially those who have followed my writing journey for years. We’ve all been struggling to find hope and any useful thing to do in a world gone crazy.

And as much as I want to tell you about the insight I gained into fiction genres and human morality by reading a very irritating gothic novel in my MFA program or discuss why white, rural Americans might feel rootless and overlooked—both of which topics might become future installments, I get the feeling that what we need right now is a bit of comfort and resilience.

We need to get through the holidays, which are fraught in the best of times. We need to regroup and reground ourselves in our values and our communities. We need to conserve energy and gather inner strength—because while I can’t possibly predict what the next year may hold, it is safe to bet that it is going to take a toll on our inner resources and resilience.

I drew some Tarot cards this morning, as I do every morning, and this time I got an interesting concept that I had never really encountered before, the call to treat my creative writing as a lover, or at least, to focus on love in my creative work. Aside from close family, the thing that fills my heart the most are those of you who keep reading my work and sometimes write back, though I am a completely obscure author. That is one way in which love is a natural part of my writing. But writing is also my comfort and solace on a cold winter’s night, much as a lover can be.

And so, I want to offer something that is more appropriate to the holidays, something that will not further tax your energy or make you ponder the genre of gothic literature a week before the Solstice.

While I was walking across the top of Pumpkin Ridge in a mini blizzard last weekend, I remembered the words of Fuji Kreider, spoken to my mother back in the 1980s when we were protesting unsafe nuclear facilities in the Pacific Northwest. My mother was in despair, she says, because no matter what we did, it seemed like it would not make much difference. Fuji said, “We have to do it because of how much worse things would be if we didn’t.”

That stayed with my mother and she’s told it to me more than once. I was a child at the time. It isn’t always enough of an answer for the hopelessness of the world, but it is still true. We are all going to have to do hard things over the next few years because of how much worse things would be if we didn’t act. And in that, we’ll keep our eyes and minds focused on that which we most need to keep safe—our children, grandchildren, land, water, air, our homes, our communities and our inner selves.

As I was walking and looking out at the Blue Mountains and the native plant preserve, crusted with cobalt-silver frost, I started humming Good King Wenceslas, which is—against my better judgement—one of my favorite holiday songs, given that it is actually referencing a murderous Christian monarch who killed the last Pagan king of Bohemia in order to seize power. Yet, it is a song about the Czech nation, which is dear to my heart, and its core messages of courage, hope and compassion thoroughly overwhelm the negative reference from and emotional standpoint.

I have made up alternative lyrics to this song before, but this time, I decided to follow the story structure of the original in which someone frightened and losing hope finds resilience and courage through wise counsel. In the original, the wise counselor is a patriarch, a king, and in conclusion, the song implies that if you follow directly in the footsteps of patriarchal power, you’ll make it through. But we’ve progressed beyond that.

So what I wondered is our current analog of a good king? What should we look to for courage, strength and hope in the midst of the storm? That line from Fuji is still a guiding light in the hardest of times. We come together and do what needs to be done. And so, for me it is community that is the good king, especially the community of progressive-minded, open-hearted people, wherever they may be.

I’ve been asked before, usually by people who vote Republican, why I care what happens to immigrant children or LGBTQ+ people or native people living near oil pipelines or people in Syria or Gaza or people in areas most quickly threatened by climate change. They aren’t me. They aren’t “our people,” I’m told. Why can’t I just put “America first”?

And that is the crux of it. They are my people. Simply put, I’ve had enough experience in my life to know and love people in every group I mentioned and in many many others. When I see people suffering somewhere far away or close to home, I don’t just see someone I don’t know. I see “my people,” a community of open-hearted people, who I have found all around the world. And that sense of unity and solidarity. That’s my “good king” in the new story.

Here then is a new holiday song for you. Feel free to sing it to the tune of Good King Wenceslas. My dad says not everyone knows the tune or how to fit new lyrics to it. So, I’ll try to sing it, though I am far from a good singer and you should not sing any false notes that I might sing, if you can help it. (Lyrics are below the video.)

Walk Between Us

(to the tune of Good King Wenceslas)

On November 6, a child looked out on the times we live in, 

As a nation renounced the rights that they had been given. 

Oh, the flags waved high that day, 

through the words were cruel. 

“Your body, my choice,” so they say,

“Long live fossil fuels.”  

Daddy, will you still love me if I am transgendered?

My friends deported, can’t you see, my future is endangered?

Darling, girl, I do love you, 

for me you are perfection.

If books they ban and people too. 

We'll fight for their protection.

Bring me cardboard and bring me more, bring me markers hither. 

You and I march at the fore when the people gather.

So forth they went parents and child, 

forth they went together

through winds of greed, brazen and wild 

and the bitter weather.

Mama, it's hopeless, I know not how, I can go no longer, 

whatever we do here now, hate grows ever stronger. 

Take our hands my little one, 

And walk between us knowing, 

As the longest night returns the sun,

Our movement still is growing.

So, young and old we come again to raise the cry of justice

They’ll tell us to blame someone, in order to divide us.

But we are family one and all,

Black, brown and white too,

Loving people heed the call,

The future depends upon you.

And now, joyous holidays, blessed Solstice, merry Christmas and happy Hanukah to you all in every corner of the world!

Letter to a person alive in 2054

This time I am not entirely writing for the people who read my blog today, although I do care for them a great deal and they may well benefit from reading this letter. Today, because of what has happened, because of the turn our country has taken, I feel the need to write for some poor soul who may stumble across my words in thirty years.

Dear person alive in the year 2054:

This post is a time capsule, a letter for you across time. If you are there, if you are reading this someday in the distant future, I am unbelievably honored to have been found, even if you are only one solitary wanderer in the archives. And I am so very sorry for what we have no doubt left to you.

I can’t predict exactly what will happen over the next thirty years, of course. But it is a very safe bet at this point to say that little coordinated action to mitigate climate change will occur between 2024 and 2028 at the very least, given the takeover of the US government explicitly by fossil fuel interests.

We have already seen record heat year after year for the past decade. In thirty years, it will no doubt be much more severe. I can’t guess what all the fallout will be. Likely you experience wildfire and drought beyond anything we can imagine, even though our fires and droughts seem unbearable and out-of-control in 2024. The United States was hit by two devastating hurricanes in the past month, much more intense than in previous years due to the heating of the oceans. And those who stole away our future made up stories about the chaotic and self-contradictory Democratic Party somehow controlling the weather, so that they can pretend fossil-fuel-caused climate change isn’t the immense threat we face.

By your time, of course, the human-caused climate disaster is undeniable but too advanced to do much about. This election has stolen the last real chance for actions that might have mitigated the terrifying calamities of your time. That’s partly why I am writing to say how sorry I am and how sorry I know so many others are, crying for you, children growing up today, children yet to be born, all who live in our future.

We fought for you. We went door-to-door helping people vote. We wrote and we demonstrated and we gave our time and our resources to try to protect your lives, because you are our future. And we know it wasn’t enough. Knowing what you know, I’m sure it is hard to understand why we didn’t all go out in the middle of the street and lie down to block traffic to stop the damage before it was too late. The truth is that some of us did just that. I did a few years back with Extinction Rebellion. People went to jail for it. People gave up their careers. But not enough people. Not enough.

Dragonfly on a string of barbed wire - creative commons image by andy blackledge

We were not strong enough. Every day for the past two months I received 5 or 6 propaganda texts on my phone from the Trump campaign. They all came from separate numbers, so when I blocked and reported each one as spam, they still came. My phone company blocks many important texts, but never those propaganda texts. The drumbeat of advertising was inescapable in any built-up area or near any screen. The vast sums of money that poured in to claim our country for corporations and billionaires were overpowering.

Over the past century, many people have struggled for social change, for women to be able to vote, for schools and restaurants and buses to be open to people of all colors, for the freedom to choose a religion other than that of the majority, for the rights of children with disabilities to be educated, for women to be able to have jobs and access their own money and assets, for people to marry whomever they chose, for medical care for gender-misalignment or sudden miscarriages or anything else, for so many things that you may never have heard people had because we don’t know if you will still have any of these rights and freedoms that we fought for or the possibility of learning about our history.

Throughout all of that social change we learned many skills—how to organize, how to stand in solidarity with one another, how to work within the system and talk to elected representatives, how to advocate for ourselves and others through the various agencies and institutions of our society, how to speak and write and think freely. But I am sorry to say, we did not learn how to deal with massive waves of corporate and billionaire power stacked against us. Today there is such a vast tsunami of money for disinformation and spam and mystification, that all of the tools we used before have been befuddled and turned against us.

Many of the poor and vulnerable of this country have believed these waves of well-funded lies and glamoured hate speech. You are certainly not to blame for being angry about that, angry at those who believed the lies and maybe especially at those of us who knew better, who were not taken in and yet failed to do anything to stop it. I don’t say you are wrong. Your anger and your anguish is clear to me.

And yet, it is worth knowing why and how such a thing happened, not because it is an excuse, but because by remembering what happened some 80 to 90 years ago in Germany, we have been warned against this kind of thing and we did fend it off for a good many years as a result. I hope you may learn from us, from this age when money has obstructed the progress of social justice organizing which served us well for a century. I hope that you will be wiser for knowing what is happening in our time. Gods, I hope your history books have not been cleansed of all the unpleasant history that you need in order to chart a better path forward.

I find myself rambling, lost in this moment of grief. What can I tell you who are alive several decades in the future that will help or comfort? I can say that we loved you, that we tried to protect and defend you. But I know we have failed and that your time will be hard beyond our imagining, even if we manage to turn all of this around in another four or ten or twenty years. The oppressive heat and storms of climate change are here to stay. And all of the things that you should have had, the wonderful dreams of a peaceful, prosperous and equitable future that we wanted for you will at the very least be on hold for a long time while we fight for the most basic level of human and civil rights, for the very foundations of democracy.

But I know that it would matter to me to know that those who came before thought of my generation with love and care. So, know this. We fought and we will continue to fight for you. Our voices are likely to be quieter now. Much of our struggle may not be easily seen because it may be very hard to publish or speak out publicly in the next several years. Our schools may well be locked against true information and free expression. Non-profit organizations may be muzzled for any disagreement with state and corporate power. Those who dare to demonstrate in the streets are likely to face swift brutality. But we will fight for you, whether out loud or quietly and without fanfare. I will and I know many others who will.

I cannot explain why so many have turned away from you, our children, even from their own children. They’ve turned away from neighbors and friends and family members too. And so many of them have turned to hate and selfishness and the momentary gratification of being told that they can cuss, bully and lie with impunity. But I do know that it has happened before. We thought we were better than that, that our nation—even our entire species—had progressed beyond a time when such a thing could happen again.

But thirty years ago when I was a young American exchange student in Germany, an old man sat me down at a kitchen table, looked into my face and spoke these words to me: “We were told we were the greatest and the best of humanity. We could not imagine anything like that could happen in our country. And it did. I know right now your country is doing well. You are told you are the best country and the greatest democracy. I hope you will remember that it can happen to you. Beware.”

He had been drafted into Hitler’s army as a young man, and yet when I met him he was one of the kindest people I knew. While many others disparaged me for my poor eyesight and put down my friends who were migrant workers from poorer East Bloc countries, this man sat down to tea with us and told us his story without trying to avoid his own accountability for having been part of a murderous war machine, willingly or not.

And so, I pass his words on to you, since we are now learning hard how true they are. “ I hope you will remember that it can happen to you.” People of the future, you have a right to be angry at us, who had a chance to turn the threat of climate change and did not. You may not have much cause to respect your elders or your ancestors. But I hope you will read this or something like it. I hope you will learn from our history. “Beware!”

Beware certainty and complacency. Beware apathy and the hope that someone else will deal with the big problems. Beware those who blame the vulnerable and the weak for things stolen by the privileged and the powerful. Beware war as a solution. Beware the impulse to protect only your own and to leave others out in the storm. This is what we have learned from our times.

Sincerely,

A person aware and conscious in 2024

Impressions of yellow and blue

All talk and no results, you say? I’ve been talking up a lot of new things over the past few months—a new guide dog and an MFA program in creative writing. Where are the goods?

Here are the goods. You waited and you now get your literary dessert—a fun, cheerful story from Arie without any of the existential dread or pondering on the world’s giant problems. I’m busy writing for my graduate program, so this month my post is one of my writing assignments, this one about color. And you get to meet my guide dog, Conway, in the process.

Enjoy!

Conway, a tuckered-out new graduate of guide dog school

Blind people don’t see black. In fact, most people called blind see something—swirls of color, fragments of light, puffs and blurs and shadows.

And those who see nothing, see nothing. Not black. Try looking out of the sole of your foot. What’s the color there?

But I am not one of those. I see like an impressionist painting, a canvas on which someone went wild with a brush, in a frenzy of creative verve and abandoned logic.

A tree is a spray of emerald and jade, velvet shadows and nut gray trunk. A paper on a dark table is a shocking white splotch, out of place, a mistake in the fabric.

After nearly fifty years in this fuzzy kaleidoscope of nuisance and occasional striking beauty, I put my name in for a guide dog, a partner to bring order to the wildness, to set me straight and maybe give me more of my own choices.

Two years later, I get the call to a training course. Bring lots of shoes. You’ll be walking many miles. Don’t pack chocolate or macadamia nuts or anything else poisonous to dogs. You must label everything with these orange tags!

It will be fun, I think, playing with dogs, maybe even a vacation. Worn out from classes and wrangling kids and canning tomatoes by feel, I am ready for relaxation with a nice pup.

The instructions sound strict, but they get all kinds of people, I figure. They have to have rules. The florescent yellow electronic scanners that lock the front doors to the dorm and every door in the training complex don’t warn me off.

The beige rooms with hard-lacquered golden wood shelves, the pale yellow hallways and drab yellow linoleum set my teeth on edge with the scent of institutionalization. But I am more than happy to put up with a lackluster pallet, all excited to meet my new companion. It was all designed for blind people after all. No wonder there’s not much variety in the color scheme.

But first there are more rules—a huge yellow binder, warm brown leashes and harnesses to learn, a lanyard to carry at all times to open just those yellow scanners accessible to students.

Meals at exact times, on beige trays. Don’t be late! Lateness to meals is disrespectful and implies you’ll be late to lessons. This is hard to swallow at the age of 48, but I do.

There are lectures and deadlines and exact specifications of every movement. Even how I walk is critiqued and corrected. Look ahead! No looking at your feet! You’ll confuse the dog!

It’s a bit like school, but much more regimented. None of my fellow trainees complains. It’s an enormous privilege to get these dogs. Their training costs around $50,000. None of us could possibly pay. So, we follow the rules—so many rules in the supposedly cheery yellow hallways.

Guide dogs are the Ivy League grads of the service-dog world. Police dogs, drug sniffing dogs, dogs for the deaf, and medical alert dogs are all often “failed” guide dogs. And it isn’t mainly intelligence that sets them apart. They’re all smart. It’s their un-dog-like laser focus, the refusal to get distracted by barking dogs, by confusing humans, by backfiring cars.

I wanted a black dog. I wear a lot of black and dog hair will be a new theme in my life. I put it down on the forms. I also wanted a female.

When they bring him to me, he is very male and very yellow. There are much more important things than color or gender in the guide dog world—pace, patience, focus. I am happy—happy and anxious, afraid of breaking the rules, afraid to mess up his training and relieved too.

The training days start at 5:40 a.m., and I crawl into bed exhausted each night. It takes most of the first week to master the dance steps required to turn right or left, like a waltz. It’s a different dance either way. And when you get up to speed, the footwork matters.

There is an exact protocol for the dining room, where the dogs must sit, how I must hold the leash, under a foot and wrapped around a hand—so many rules under the pale yellow lights.

My guide dog conway and I on the ridge at sunset

Each morning we walk by the yolk yellow curb toward the transport vans and every morning there is an intentional boobytrap ready to trip up the unwary student—a barking dog, an over-eager woman offering dog treats, an awkwardly placed sandwich board. And each morning our instructor in a sunshine-yellow jacket lectures me on my many missteps or incorrect hand gestures or mixed up verbal commands.

Then, we drive into the city and stop at various places to walk through city blocks, learning the tricks and traps of working with a guide dog. Orangish yellow rectangles with tactile half-domes at the curb-cuts are like bases in a surreal game of baseball. We scramble to them to get safe from traffic, but gracefully and with all the right footwork.

In the evenings there are lectures by the warm lamplight in the common room. And woe to any student who can’t keep their dog calmly sitting or lying for the duration. And that is usually me. My yellow guy is quieter and more focused than most, but that one thing he does not like—to sit through lectures. And of course, he is going home with the one who is a graduate student.

He is almost too good, somber and serious most of the time. The other dogs play with tug toys, prance in anticipation of going out, show gladness when praised. My dog just puts his head down, does the work and endures.

Finally, graduation day is here, the greatest test of all. We dress up, groom our dogs til they gleam and keep them in perfect order. The stage is gold-stained wood at the front of the room and rows of chairs fill with donors, volunteers, the puppy foster families and my own family. My dog and I walk across the stage and I say a few words that I barely register into the microphone, pleasant, all by the rules—the bright yellow spotlights wiping out all of my color sense.

Then there is a tour for the supporters of the school in which my dog and I show our tricks and smile and thank everyone and be gracious. It is good to be thankful.

Finally, we drive away from the school in my family’s car with my autumn-wheat-yellow dog in the back. A new chapter opening, but there is still an anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach. He is too sober, too quiet. Is something wrong?

Even after so many years, my mother laments that I cannot see the wild goats on the cliffs above the Columbia Gorge or the bald eagles out over the river. I’m sure they’re wonderful. It would be nice, of course. But I don’t feel a pang. The panorama of color is plenty for me. Swirls of pine green, khaki and lime on the hillsides. The expanse of deep blue sky and the cobalt slash of the river, impressions of golden hills rising on the Washington side. Red and orange speckles are what I see of late season flowers and the black, yellow and white stripes of the freeway homeward.

We stop at Arlington, the little park by the river where we always stop. It’s a good place to let the dog out to do his thing. He’s reticent. The school rules insist he must do the deed on concrete. Usually in a place like this that means in a parking spot. It makes it easy for a blind person to pick up after him and there are places where there is no grass, so guide dogs have to be used to the indignity of pavement.

At last, we walk across the verdant lawn toward the river. My new companion has continued to be stoic. His pace is steady, a little slow at times, in need of my encouragement and prodding.

But here by the river, I feel the pull in his harness grow and then we’re flying across the lawn, out along the river, the periwinkle graduation dress I still have on matching the evening sky, and I lope in long strides, unafraid of tripping because every detail of the land is carried to my hand through the stiff harness. With him, I can run without fear of falling.

Grass and river and sky are different from yellow hallways and paved streets. The school says all an animal needs is food, water, play and affection. But this yellow boy born on the Winter Solstice greets the sweet-smelling earth like a long-lost friend. Oh, you may dislike lectures, but you are a lucky dog because we are going to the mountains, and you will love it there.

He’s dancing then, frolicking and leaping in circles, very un-guide-dog-like. Very like a dog. His tail is slapping my legs. His creamy-yellow joy rising into the deep blue.

Teens, sex and public health obfuscation

I am sorry to do this to you, but like your high school sex education teacher, I have the uncomfortable duty to… address a… well… subject that can be a bit awkward. By that I mean (gulp) “S. E. X.”

Worse yet, I need to discuss teenagers and sex and birth control and porn and hickies and well, you get the point. But bear with me. That was probably the most uncomfortable part of this post.

The inspiration for my dive into this weird and adult-torturing world of teen sex came when I recently attempted to help a young girl get birth control in rural Eastern Oregon. The girl had very recently become obsessed with sex, told me about her boyfriend in detail, showed me her hickies, alternately expressed fear and disgust about sex, said in no uncertain terms that she isn’t ready “to have babies,” as well as accidentally downloaded—and in fascinated shock—read several viciously manipulative pornographic pamphlets designed to groom girls for being sex-trafficked (specifically about mob bosses forcing extremely explicit sex on their young daughters to “protect” them from the other mob bosses, free on Amazon Kindle and anywhere child pornography and middle-school comic books are sold next to each other).

Knowing the girl and her situation, I was aware that she lives with limited supervision and she has a developmental disability that makes impulsivity and difficulty foreseeing consequences very challenging for her. Has there ever been a case where birth control was more clearly indicated?

I made an appointment at a local public health agency for a consultation. I was told even during the scheduling that the girl “has to agree on her own,” despite being both well underage and developmentally disabled, which combine to deny her any reasonable ability to give informed consent. I figured I could talk her through it.

While both parents were enthusiastic about getting birth control for her, the agency insisted they had no say in the matter.

The day of the consultation arrived and the girl was nervous and uncomfortable. She was immediately handed a stack of 30-plus pages of dense forms to fill out and I was ordered to stay out of it. Due to her disability, she scribbled on the signature lines without understanding what it was for. After 45 grueling minutes and a bureaucrat who eventually relented and “helped” her fill out the forms by misspelling her name multiple times, we got into the actual consultation.

amateur Actors playing the roles of teenage lovers in the lion king - image by Arie Farnam

I had promised the girl that this would be quick and easy, because I’d been told it was just a brief consultation ahead of a procedure. And her tolerance for long paperwork and confusing, boring adult conversation is very limited, yet she held up admirably.

Then, we were shown in to see the nurse, who immediately began to talk about sex in graphic and uncomfortable detail. When the girl cringed in loathing and anxiety, the nurse stopped abruptly and asked if this was really something she wanted to do. The girl said, “Well, no. I don't want to do it. They want me to!” indicating me and apparently family members not present at the moment.

The nurse immediately started to end the interview and stated that there was no way birth control would be offered in this case. And some god came down from Asgard and created a miracle, because the girl, who is normally timid and diffident when it comes to unknown adults, faced the nurse again and said she had changed her mind and did want it. She was forced to rehash that consent at least five times over the next 45 minutes of explicit sex consultation, and bless her, she did.

The next day, before the date when the birth control device was to be implanted, I got a phone call from the agency demanding documents showing the parents’ guardianship, despite the fact that “they have no say in the matter.” I provided the documentation and pretended I was not livid with outrage at these two-faced guardians of male access to the reproductive capacities of teenage girls.

I fantasized about the conversation I’d have after she was safely protected, asking them if they thought there was anything else they could do to make birth control harder or more uncomfortable for a young disabled girl to access. But when the time came, my entire focus was on comforting the young girl, who was terrified of the Lidocaine numbing injection and awed by all the sterile preparations. So, I didn’t say anything except “Thank you!” as we walked out.

But the whole incident illustrated how far we are from a society that truly protects the choices of the most vulnerable women and girls. Do I think underage girls should have choices about their bodies. Definitely, I do. Do I think that they should be considered “consenting adults” when it comes to being manipulated, tricked or forced to become pregnant and have babies. No, I vigorously disagree. Should an underage girl who demonstrates understanding of the issues and who can make informed decisions of a complex nature be allowed to refuse birth control? Well, yes. I guess I agree with the spirit of the law on this.

But should a developmentally disabled child be forced to endure lengthy explicit discussions of sex and give repeated rote recitations of a consent she doesn’t understand in order to be protected from pregnancy, which she does clearly state that she does not want? No. This made no sense and it was in several respects both irresponsible on the part of health care providers and unnecessarily shaming to the girl.

The long and the short of it should be that at this age birth control is health care. It’s no different than a vaccination, and parents give consent for vaccinations. Children often vehemently disagree because they don’t like being poked with needles and they get vaccinated anyway, if they have responsible parents.

The young girl I helped get birth control is still confused about what it is for, despite having it explained a dozen times or more. She’s asked several times if it will keep her from being kidnapped. We told her it wouldn’t do that and that it is only to keep her from having babies before she is old enough. But the truth is that there are all sorts of ways such a vulnerable young woman could end up needing birth control. She may break up with her boyfriend tomorrow. But she is a vibrant young person with a healthy body, which includes natural sexuality.

And there are plenty of predators out there, some of whom would be delighted at the rural “public health” response to making birth control particularly uncomfortable for a teenage girl to obtain.