The 2017 List: 13 things to bring into the new year

With some truly depressing 2017 lists out there, I want to add a couple that might actually come in handy... or at least crack a smile.

Here is the Rebel With a Pen list of what to take with you when leaping into 2017:

1. Chocolate

2. A solar panel

3. A manual for communicating with racists

4. A Canadian passport or at least least a maple leaf bumper sticker

5. Your entire library of books

6. Wool socks

7. A couple of 1960s protest albums

8. Food stockpiles

9. A bomb shelter

10. Your family and near neighbors

11. A first aid kit with extra bandages

12. Your ability to laugh in the face of disaster

13. Your generosity of spirit when it comes to people you might feel like judging

And with some of the bizarre wish lists out there, I figured that my brand of fantasy wouldn't seem far fetched at all. Here's my wish list for 2017:

1. I wish Donald Trump would get on TV, laugh really loud and say, "Just kidding!" And then go back to his moocher lifestyle and leave us in peace.

2. I wish everyone in the media would suddenly realize they should actually listen to scientists. Then science and climate discussions would be at the top of the news cycle all year long.

3. I wish oil executives would realize the Indians own that land in North Dakota and that squeezing every last drop of oil out of the sand in Texas is not going to prolong their gluttonous lifestyle for very long anyway so they might as well start thinking about long-term survival.

4. I wish my kids would wake up January 1 and realize that bickering defeats fun.

5. I wish the next president would declare a new New Deal consisting of building solar panels to go on every roof and a light-rail system serving the entire country.

6. I wish all the teenage ISIS fighters would get a deep hankering to go live with their mothers and watch TV until they're forty.

7. I wish all bombs, missiles and munitions as well as all guns not in a safe under lock and key would mysteriously disappear on January 1.

8. I wish someone brilliant would invent a way for writers and artists to make a living at their craft.

9. I wish Microsoft would go bankrupt and have to sell off all of its parts to independent programmers who want to make an honest living.

10. I wish our society would begin taxing the use of natural resources instead of the labor of the working poor and the funds would be put toward educational opportunity, urban greenspaces, rural public transit and subsidies for high quality cottage industries.

11. I wish a benign virus would evolve and spread among humans which deactivates the part of the brain that categorizes according to skin color, speech pattern and the appearance of a person's eyes.

With those sweet and optimistic thoughts in mind, I wish you a very happy (and peaceful) new year!

Surviving the new reality

Rain drums on the roof as I write. I am on enforced rest. Doctor's orders. I could cry for joy over the rest, except that the eye surgeon has forbidden me to express intense emotions. 

But you get the idea. I don't feel sick but I'm supposed to stay inside, keep warm, not work much and be at peace. I know, I wish I could spread it around a little too.

The only downside of this is a feeling of vulnerability that comes with the isolation.  I hesitate to venture out much, even on-line. I am a bit breakable and the world has suddenly become doubly harsh.

Creative Commons image by Sepp Schimmer

I saw a post from an old work colleague about attacks against people of color in the US. I wrote in a quick reply of support and bittersweet humor. And instead of solidarity, my old office-mate lashed out at me, labeling me an "sheltered white expat." 

I instantly had the urge to fight back. I'm not one who takes things lying down or turns the other cheek. Sure, I'm white and I know better than many white people what privileges and protections that entails. I am highly aware when I meet police officers that I am wearing the backpack of white privilege--then and many other times. I also know that when any country is in the grip of fear that there is an understandable anger toward emigres--those who left, no matter how good their reasons. 

On the other hand, I'm also a person with a significant physical disability. I'm up against the wall in this too. My children are not white and they are newly naturalized citizens. Will we ever be able to go back to visit my home and family again? That is not an idle question in these post-election days. We are also in a country (the Czech Republic) that Donald Trump has pledged to put a military base in. We are isolated for the moment, but far from off the hook. 

Still, I bit my lip and said none of that. I know well the furious emotions raging in my colleague's post. I replied only to express more simple and direct support for her. I told her I am an ally and I understand her words. She and another friend continued to express anger and rejection toward me. There was no reconciliation. 

I am worried.

I'm saddened to lose a connection to someone I enjoy simply due to these terrible times. But I am even more worried by what this negative interaction among allies means for our people--the people of our country, citizens and non-citizens, all cultures and all backgrounds. We're stuck in this together, after all. 

My home county in Oregon reportedly voted 67 percent for Trump. There are people I call friends who did and likely even a few only moderately distant relatives. And if I cannot meet a friend who agrees with me in support and solidarity, if we are so divided that I am the enemy even when I am not across the political divide, how... oh gods, how will we live with those who really do hate and choose a hateful leader? 

Let's take a moment to forget that Trump even exists. 

Sigh. Now doesn't that feel better? 

But wait a minute. There's a problem. We've made Trump disappear but we haven't made the many people who vehemently support him disappear. Sure, we can say they are a minority, as few as 20 percent of the nation and not even most of the voters. But they are enough and we have to live with them, Trump or no Trump.

I have always felt this because of where I grew up, far from the cosmopolitan and high-thinking coasts. I love visiting Portland, Seattle, New York or Francisco for precisely this reason. Our bubble of acceptance and freedom feels so good. 

But we forget that this is not all of the nation at our peril. We ignore rage at our peril. We belittle politically incorrect antagonism at our peril. We've seen that now.

I know it is hard to think about surviving the next four years. But we will... most of us at least. And here is how I propose to do it:

Creative Commons image by Peter Roome

• If there is a registry for Muslims, get on it. I'll be a Muslim on paper.  If we're all on the list, the list will have no teeth.
• Talk to Trump supporters. Really talk and listen. Listen to what motivates them, what they are upset about. Share your thoughts with respect and without contempt.  They are people and most people are susceptible to change, even if slow change.
• Promote facts, everywhere, over and over again. The media will not help, so we have to do it. Talk about facts, post them, remember them, make lists. Don't let up about climate change.
• Explain white privilege, primarily if you're white. Explain it again and again and again until you're sick of it and then explain it to more people. There is no way we're as sick of explaining it as Black, Hispanic and Native American people are.
• Talk to the person no one is talking to at a gathering. Invite the disabled colleague or classmate to whatever. Connect. 
• Make your circle bigger. Whatever it is you can give easily, put it in. Got a neighbor with younger kids who could use some of your nicer used clothes? Got extra veggies from the garden? Got wood or materials or whatever? Buy less, trade more, reuse more. Gain your security from community.
• Take care of your own basic needs with as little resources as possible. Reduce plastics and fossil fuels in whatever ways you can. And remember you'll do more and better if you're rested, healthy and fed. Don't wait to be taken care of. Stand strong, think ahead, link arms.

My hope is with you. 

A thousand years of fishing

Pale, autumn sunlight sifts through the morning mist, a thread of weak yellow in the grayish brown landscape..

Image by Arie Farnam

My hands are nearly frozen, gripping the side of a jolting wagon and a child between my knees. And this is just the beginning.

But there are thermoses of hot water for tea and bottles of rum for grog and if anyone will be warm it will be me. My task is usually tending the small cookfire on the dike.

It's the annual fish harvest in South Bohemia and we're on our way to the ponds, bundled up for several hours of frigid work. There is no snow yet and only a mild layer of frost but everything is wet and will get wetter. The land here used to be a marsh after all.

Each year we are pressed into service by my husband's family on the last weekend in October to help fish out the ponds that hold the winter's supply of carp and pike. It's a tradition a thousand years old. The men dress in hip-high rubber boots and old farm jackets and wade out into the muck of the partly drained ponds with giant nets spread between them. Then at the grandfather's signal, they form a line and heard the fish in to the center. 

Image by Arie Farnam

I am always struck by the odd beauty of this ritual. It is all about mud, cold and hard, dirty work. But the fact that the techniques used hundreds of years ago are still the most effective makes it magical. And the realization that the five-hundred-year-old network of fishponds and water channels has made humans an integral part of the ecology of this land make it beautiful. 

When the fish are drawn into a wriggling, silver-flashing mass in the center of their circle, the fishermen lift them with scoop nets, while others sort them into huge drums of water--one for the smallest immature fish, one for those that will be left to grow another year and one for the full-sized fish, which will be kept in clear water for a month to ensure that they don't smell like mud. Then they'll be served for holiday dinners.

Image by Arie Farnam

Dozens of people come to the fish harvest, many to work for a free fish, many just to watch from the dike. I hand out grog and tea. This used to be my mother-in-law's job and I was only her helper. This is the first year since she passed on. 

My children run wild in the pack of local children, splashing through the shallow black water and spattering themselves with that peculiar stinking black mud of the South Bohemian bogs that is nearly impossible to wash out of clothes and off of skin. But such family traditions are worth more than a set of clothes. 

I warm my reddened hands by the fire and watch as the sun emerges from behind the heavy clouds, briefly setting the autumn trees around the pond ablaze with color. 

The Problem with Asking for Help

Just a few weeks into the school year, I was almost late taking my first grader to school. But on my way back, I heard screaming from inside a car in a neighbor's driveway. 

I knew the one. There is only one car there now, where there used to be two. That one belongs to a mother with three little girls, one barely more than a toddler. They were always known for being quiet and keeping to themselves but things have been hard in the last few weeks.

Creative Commons image by Damian Gadal

Her husband left her just before the first day of school. And she works at a school as well. Still she's late. Really late, if I was nearly late and I'm already back.

I hope my face shows my concern and empathy. But she probably just wishes no one was witnessing her family struggle, her kids screaming and fighting in the car, the lateness, the frantic stress. 

She's a very private person. I am on good neighborly terms with her, trading waves and gardening tips. But she has never been open to deeper friendship. I only know her husband left because my kids overheard a gossiping neighbor and brought the tale home to me. The woman herself has not told me, and I don't think she'd appreciate anyone approaching the subject from the outside.

And yet, I wish I could help. And I could. My kids went by there a few times in the past weeks and found a paid babysitter with her kids, something almost unheard of in this country, where parents and grandparents are expected to be on hand and babysitting isn't an industry. I could watch her girls for an afternoon and it would mean only a bit more attention than just watching my own kids. I could water her garden in a pinch.

I could just listen and make her a cup of tea. Easily. My life is hectic but that much I could do.

Yet I can't do much at all, if she keeps up the appearance that everything is fine, if I know of her trouble only through unwanted gossip. And when I ask her if she would like to come to tea, she just looks harried and too busy. She says, "Sure, sometime. I'll let you know," but she never does. 

I suppose this is what people mean when they say that many people don't ask for help when they should. I've heard it so often in the past few years, that it is becoming annoying. Whenever experts talk about 'self care" or social skills these days it seems like they always tack this on to the end: Ask for help.

Creative Commons image by Jon Marshall

"Overcome your aversion to asking for help and just ask."

The connotation is that help will be readily offered.

And yet I know full well why this woman does not ask for help. Help often isn't forthcoming. If she asked for help, she would have to ask many times--embarrassing herself, damaging her reputation and exposing her children to potential ridicule--before running across someone who would help.

You doubt it? You think most people will readily help?

A recent UNISEF video documented an experiment conducted with a six-year-old girl. The child was dressed in ragged clothes with messy hair, in order to look like a homeless child and positioned on a busy street in a major city. A team o adults watched from a distance and filmed the child standing alone amid the hurrying crowds. No one stopped to ask if the child was lost or in need of help.

Then the child was dressed in expensive, fashionable clothing, combed and clean, and positioned in the same place. As soon as the child was alone several people, primarily women, stopped to ask if the child was lost or needed help. Some started calls on their cell phones seeking help for the child from authorities. 

Next the experiment sent the child into a restaurant, first in the expensive clothing--in which she was engaged cheerfully by diners and praised as she wandered among the tables--then in the ragged clothes. When the ragged child moved around the tables in the restaurant, she was insulted and told that she had to leave and never come there again. This, even given that the child did not touch anything, speak or do anything but walk around and sometimes make eye contact. 

Eventually the insults and harsh words were too much for the six-year-old and she fled from the restaurant crying and continued to sob even while being comforted by familiar adults. The experiment had to be called off, given the potential for emotional trauma. An eerie follow-up took place when the video was posted on social media, in which the large majority of comments make illogical excuses for the negative behavior of adults toward the child. 

Most of those who did not make excuses in their comments professed shock when they saw the videos. But I'm not shocked.

Today I return from the school with a heavy heart. There is a school choir my daughter wanted to be in, but the school building for some of the first graders--including my daughter--is several streets away from the main school where the choir practices are held early in the afternoon. Because I can't drive, I would have to go three miles on foot to bring my child to choir practice in the middle of the day and then return to teaching my own classes. My work schedule won't allow it. I have strategized and shuffled things around every which way. But it won't work. 

I asked the school for help--the classroom teacher, the aids, the extracurricular coordinator, the choir teacher. They insisted that it is the responsibility of parents to transport their kids between school buildings, and that the fact that many first graders have their classes in the building with extracurricular activities but my child doesn't is simply my own problem, rather than an unfair disadvantage. I asked other parents too. No one is willing to help though some will drive their own kids to choir.

When I asked, one lady even said, "Do you expect me to pity you or something?"

No dear, I asked for for help, not pity. Somehow our society has become confused about the difference. 

Creative Commons image by Erizof of flickr.com

I don't mean to be depressing. I try to make my writing uplifting and nurturing. So, this is the nurturing part. If you are like me, you have heard many times that you need to learn to ask for help at times. You've heard it from experts, from from the media, from self-help books. So, you end up feeling inadequate yet again. Not only do you fail at meeting the ideal of perfect independence and emotional self-sufficiency. You aren't even any good at asking for help, otherwise, the experts imply, you would have it. 

Well, they're wrong. It isn't you. It's the times. 

I'm not saying don't ask for help. Do ask. There are people who want to help, not out of pity but out of the knowledge that a strong community is our best protection in hard times and the most important thing in a survivalist kit. It is not your failing that not everyone has that knowledge. 

Keep asking for community and be assured that no matter how small your means or how difficult your physical life, there are ways you could help a neighbor or a stranger in need. Find them. Make yourself interdependent. That is strength that lasts.

I'll be on the look out for a chance to help my neighbor with the three little girls. Today I'll call a mother who's in her ninth month of pregnancy and offer to pick her son up from preschool and keep him a couple of hours. And just this week, a migrant woman who speaks little of the local language admitted to me that her husband has been beating her severely and I was able to connect her with a specific counselor at a reputable organization with shelters and legal aid.  

As for my daughter's school, the principal asked me to help her find someone from an English-speaking country who would like to be a semi-paid volunteer in their English teaching program for a year.

And I can help in their search because I know many English-speaking people. Sometimes even school administrators must learn a lesson and this one is about community.
 

Exceedingly clean fun

Firefighters, trucks and hoses fill the village square amid screaming children. And a strange white substance floats on the wind, clinging to bodies and clothes and piling up in a mountain on the cobblestones.

At first glance, it looks a bit like a disaster zone.

Image by Arie Farnam

But on closer inspection, the screams turn to shrieks of delight. The children run toward the white spray and hurl themselves into the mass of foam.

As a foreigner at this spectacle years ago, I was initially a bit disturbed and concerned for the children's health. However, the foam turns out to be mild bubble bath. And this has become almost an annual event in our small town now.

The volunteer firefighters come to the square during some special occasion and fill it with a huge cushion of foam. Then the children romp in it. 

Is there anything more aptly called "clean fun?"

I stand back against the a railing and watch, though I can't see much with my eyesight, just a white blur and the wriggling shadows of the children. There is a slight distance between me and the other watching parents.

I am a foreigner and that "odd lady who teaches English and grows herbs." I'm a reasonably well-tolerated modern version of the village witch. They even call my house the "Gingerbread house" because it has red-stained wood siding and white window frames. It also stands at the edge of town near abandoned land. 

I have mixed feelings about this community, which has not so much taken me in as allowed me to exist in a foreign land. There are a few people in town--now after 12 years--who might come up to me and talk, if they were here. But most who know me won't and I cannot see them, so I don't even know which of them is present. 

I am not the only one who suffers from the cold edges of this community. Many of the elderly are left alone and when I greet them in the street and stop to talk, they are at times bitter and at times simply astonished to be acknowledged. 

Still I am glad to see that there are those here who struggle to build community. The firefighters are among them. They are volunteers in a country where volunteerism has a bad name--an aftertaste of forced community service under threat from the old Communist regime of a generation ago.

And now the firefighters have started this new tradition--one they care enough about that even though they were called out on a fire and an auto accident this very afternoon, they managed to come to the village fair as promised. We had given up hope and started for home when we heard about the accident. 

We all came running back when the trucks came down main street and the children cheered as the sun touched the horizon. And I know they will remember this all their lives. The children will remember that the firefighters are good, not scary, and that they keep they're promises. 

I have no illusions that this means the community will be healed of all the wounds of the past. There have been many. (It has taken 12 years but finally someone whispered to me that the reason we have no Roma in our town--except in my family--is that there were pogroms against them 20 years ago and they were all forced to flee.) 

Yet community leans back and forth between exclusion and inclusion. This is part of a shift toward inclusion and community strength. It is somewhere to stand.