A world designed for people like me

I have defended the terms “disability” and “disabled” in the past because I like both linguistics and logic. But today I’d like to do a thought experiment that may put those terms in peril.

There are those who don’t like the word “disability” because it implies that only one type of body is right and good and perfect. It places emphasis on some particular capacity that someone may lack when compared with a supposedly perfect standard, while ignoring non-standard capacities they may have that the standard human doesn’t possess. .

The Deaf community has made a good case for getting rid of the disability label. Many Deaf people live without any sense of disability because they live primarily within a community that uses sign language and written communication. Both entertainment and safety are also well developed in this community. And it is only when they enter the hearing community that Deaf people become more likely to suffer injury due to mishaps or to fall victim to police violence.

An image of a middle-aged blonde woman with sunglasses and an expression of peace - Creative Commons image by Marneejill of Flickr.com

If a person is perfectly safe and able in one society but not in another, is the fault or lack of ability with the individual? Or is it rather a problem within the society?

Many of us assume it is the individual who should adapt. At the very least, it is easier for an individual to adapt than it is to change a whole society, and when we travel to different countries we accept that it is a good idea to adapt somewhat to the culture, and even more so, to the laws of that country.

But most people with disabilities don’t have the strong community and institutions that Deaf people have built up through years of struggle, and we likely never will. Disabilities come in many shapes and sizes and it is impossible for each group to build their own society. We will always be strangers and foreigners in a world that isn’t built by or for us. Beyond that, in many ways we cannot adapt to society for various physical and neurological reasons. That is why efforts have been made to adapt society just enough to give us a narrow opportunity to live.

Abled people often express a bit of resentment over these adaptations, as if parking spaces that allow people with mobility impairments to get to the store at all are somehow a huge advantage. I recently stumbled across a news story from my home state of Oregon, where I am moving in a couple of months that sent raw fear into me.

In the town of Brookings, Oregon, a woman named Jennifer Gaymen, who is visually impaired, like me, and also mildly mobility impaired, also like me, was arrested, jailed and charged with a felony for simply surviving in the only way she or I can. Like me, she can’t drive or move in the roadway, due to vision impairment. And she also can’t walk long distances due to an orthopedic illness. So, she rides a mobility scooter slowly on the sidewalk much like a wheelchair user. I do the same thing.

But a few years back, abled people in Oregon felt resentful of these mobility scooters, much like the disabled parking spaces. There were some abled people who abused electric scooters on sidewalks, behaving dangerously and scaring or injuring pedestrians. So, a law was passed banning all use of electric scooters on sidewalks. Because of the resentment toward people with disabilities this law was expanded to include mobility scooters and even to bar the use of mobility scooters on roads by anyone who doesn’t have a full automobile driver’s license, which essentially excludes the very people mobility scooters are intended for.

This is despite the fact that a search failed to unearth any case reports alleging that any person with a disability using a mobility scooter has abused pedestrian rules or endangered others on sidewalks in Oregon or anywhere else.

This law renders Jennifer Gayman and me—people who are normally quite active and capable—severely disabled and essentially homebound. Gayman was cited for riding her mobility scooter and then jailed and convicted of a felony for refusing to abandon her expensive mobility device in the middle of the night in the winter and walk two miles home, which she physically could not do.

She has sued the city under the American with Disabilities Act, a federal law which clearly states that people with disabilities can use whichever mobility device best fits their needs and that local laws must adapt. But she has been homebound and restricted from getting around for two years while the case languishes in the court system.

Once I might have been significantly disabled before this kind of technology existed, but today with the help of technology the “dis” or “un” abling part of mobility is significantly mitigated. If a law then imposes artificial disability on me, how should I be labeled? Does it make logical sense to say this is my “disability?” It isn’t my “dis” (wrong or lack of) ability that causes me to be homebound in that case. It is more correct to say that I am a “restricted” or “banned” person, because it is external restriction that imposes the primary limitation.

Maybe we should start using these terms when referring to individuals who live in a society where rules, laws and social norms restrict or ban them when reasonable and healthy adaptation is possible that would make them fully capable.

This all got me thinking about what a society would have to look like to make me completely abled without restricting others. Even allowing reasonable access for mobility scooters only makes me theoretically able to move a little bit—slowly and very locally.

Here’s the thought experiment then. What would it take to really make it so a person like me who is legally blind with some mobility impairment would be able to view my differences like many Deaf people do, simply as a difference rather than a disability?

To be clear, I can’t cover every type of different body or neurological type because I don’t have all those experiences. This is just an exercise in figuring out what would make the difference for me.

An image of older adults riding bicycles in professional clothing next to a modern street car in Copenhagen, Denmark - Creative Commons image by Dylan Passmore

Getting around

The first issue has to be mobility because even though some of the other issues are arguably more important, history has taught us that if people with disabilities can’t get to the table, nothing ever changes. Secondly, the mobility issue is the one that would require the most difficult adaptation from society.

What I need is to be able to get around both locally and beyond about as fast as other people. That is simply what I would need in order to “not be disabled anymore,” to be able to work competitively, take care of all of my responsibilities and take advantage of all the opportunities everyone else takes for granted. I currently really appreciate ANY mobility options, even when they are much slower and more difficult than those most people enjoy. But this is what it would take to make me “abled.”

What could a society look like that would give me that?

Well, public transportation would have to be the mainstream. If there was personal automobile transport that you have to see in order to drive, it would have to be a secondary thing. Roads would not be what goes everywhere. Rail lines would. Roads would be the secondary sort of thing, like a hobby or something special.

Parking lots would be small and easily navigable on foot because most people would use trams, trolleys and trains for major transportation. Our cities would no longer be 60 percent asphalt, maybe 20 or 30 percent at most.

Because they would be used by vast numbers of people, these rail transport systems would be well funded by taxes and affordable for people to use, though it would be an expense, like gas is to many people today. You would hardly have to wait for the next tram or train in most places because that would be “the main road.” Because of the relative high speed of rail transport, the fact that these vehicles have to stop to pick people up at various stops would even out and transportation would be about as fast as road transport is today, except over long distances it might well be much faster. And I’m not even counting traffic jambs in this accounting.

All these public transport options would accommodate not just wheelchairs but every kind of mobility device and likely also bicycles for everyone who wants them. The first would ensure accessibility for all and the second would just be common sense.

Under these conditions, people with disabilities would move just as fast as abled people, and thus in a lot of ways, they would become abled and would be full competitors for jobs and full contributors to all of society.

Routes for bikes, scooters and walking would be everywhere and well adapted to the landscape and the rail transport system. There would always be a ramp. There might be some lanes for fast movers where pedestrians, children and people with vision or neurological impairment might not fit in, but there would always be a slower alternative and safety rules for when these intersect.

People with vision impairment could have color-coded elements on their scooters or bikes to warn faster riders about their difference in reaction times and perception, but they would also have to demonstrate that they were not dangerous to pedestrians and those slower than themselves.

Yes, these changes would mean that society would have to adapt to make people with mobility, vision and other impairments equal and abled. However, these adaptations would also help to solve climate change and be environmentally friendly for everyone. The reductions in air pollution and the greening of vast swaths of asphalt in cities would improve everyone’s quality of life and would likely mean more pleasant community space for everyone. It would require adaptation by society but the benefits would also go to everyone.

Social norms

The other most significant adaptation would have to be in social norms. First, we would have to start talking about diversity in terms of different shapes and types of bodies and brains as much as we talk about it when it comes to race and sexual or gender identity. It would help that, with the mobility adaptations detailed above, the fear of disability as debilitating and physically limiting would begin to abate among all people.

But some prejudices and stereotypes hang on long after legal and infrastructure restrictions have been lifted from a group of people, as we saw when the civil rights movement lifted many of the legal restrictions on people of color. It would take some time for social norms to develop so that people would not respond so negatively to a person with a facial or speech difference, but just as reactions to people with various skin tones have changed, this too can change and would go a long way toward making disability no more than a difference.

Just as there is a push to change social norms today to use the pronouns preferred by individuals with non-traditional gender identities, some social norms would need to change with regard to disabilities as well. People would need to become more flexible and educated in how they interact. Because 15 to 20 percent of people have a disability that affects communication and social interaction, flexible ways of interacting would become part of our educational system for everyone, just as spelling rules and how to use money are part of the curriculum today.

Everyone would know to speak directly and clearly to a Deaf person. Everyone would know to let a Blind friend know when they approach and who they are. Everyone would know not to move a Blind person’s things. Everyone would know how to interpret and engage with people with neuro-diversity because it would be a normal part of daily life and would be as much a part of manners as “please” and “thank you.”

Bullying people about a physical, neurological or other kinds of differences would become as anathema as any other kind of harassment. It likely wouldn’t disappear as harassment that we clearly see as serious and relevant today has not disappeared, but it would be treated with the same seriousness that assaulting a privileged person is in today’s world, and its occurrence would be massively reduced.

As a result, attitudes toward friendship, romantic relationships and professional relationships with people with any sort of difference would markedly improve likely without the need for much more in terms of explicit rules or “political correctness.”

Public services and commerce

Naturally, buildings and public spaces would be built to accommodate the various shapes and sizes and legs and wheels of modern humans. Ramps and elevators would be maintained and mainstream.

Public signs would be bold and large print—larger than surrounding advertisements. Advertisements would be given a specific space, and not allowed to dominate attention or prey on neuro-diverse people or disorient visually impaired people.

Many signs, buildings, transportation vehicles and other public objects would have a small short-range transceiver which could be picked up by bluetooth and cell devices, so that blind or text-impaired people could listen to an audio transcription or description through earbuds.

Thus a street car would announce over a common frequency its number, direction, stops and conditions. A hospital or mall map or sign board would give verbal directions directly into the earpieces of those who pointed and clicked at it. Public restrooms, information booths, checkout counters and other important points would provide a directional beacon and broadcast over several hundred meters.

An image of grinning military veterans with prosthetic limbs fist bumping while using mobility devices freely in the middle of a major road - Creative Commons image by Herald Post

There would not only be Braille and large high-contrast print on elevator buttons but also on the aisles in grocery stores and on other things everyone needs to use. All labels on goods in stores would be required to have a QR code (turned outward on the shelf) which could be quickly scanned for audio description. Sections of a store would also be clearly marked with large print and short-range audio beacons.

The brightest and most visible signs would not be advertisements but rather necessary information. Shopping would become a regular, pain-free activity even for visually impaired people.

Instructions posted on walls in public offices would show up as audio notifications and blind people would no longer have to rely on the kindness of strangers to inform them of rules or procedures when visiting the local city hall or health center. A lot of this would require technology but it is all technology which is already easily available and in wide use today for other things.

Technology, entertainment and work environments

Technology would be a great help in opening up productive engagement to people who were previously “disabled” by our society in so many other ways as well. In my case, facial recognition software could be used with a small camera worn on clothing or glasses that would recognize the faces at least of the people I had already met and would identify them to me with audio notifications. This would break down vast barriers in professional networking and community interactions.

Similar technology could be used to help visually impaired people navigate. Already mapping technology is able to tell us how to navigate within a few meters accuracy. A little investment could render blind people significantly abled by giving on-demand information about nearby addresses, hazards and points of interest.

Technology could easily be developed that would provide detailed description and warnings on familiar routes that the individual could input manually, including things as detailed as when a step is needed and which direction to turn and how much. With the technology we have today cell phones could easily tell a blind person where to find a known person or a nearby business or landmark with detailed on-foot instructions. While most of these technologies stop their assistance once the person is close enough to theoretically look up and see what they are seeking, the assistance could be extended for blind people.

One piece of technology which I have not yet seen but which could be developed with our current technology and which would greatly increase safety for blind and visually impaired people would be a program for a camera mounted on glasses or a headband that would identify obstacles through an earphone.

While a properly made white cane is actually a pretty nifty piece of mechanical technology, it only identifies obstacles on the ground and many injuries happen because of signs, awnings, tree branches and the like at higher levels, especially at face level. Even service dogs (may they be always appreciated) don’t always catch everything.

We have devices that beep when there is an obstacle behind a car backing up, and we could have a much more sophisticated detector mounted on glasses that would help a blind person navigate safely. The same technology with a bit more development could even be adapted to help with tracking moving objects, animals and people, and might eventually provide an aid to self defense and sports.

Some technology changes would require human intervention, at least in the beginning. We would still need humans to put closed caption text and audio description into movies and TV shows or onto media images, but these would be regular jobs within these industries because people with visual and auditory differences would be normal members of society with the economic clout to matter and even if they weren’t a “big enough” demographic to be “profitable,” it would be part of the social norm, to include these things.

Would there still be jobs that I couldn’t do because of my vision and mobility differences? Sure, there would. I still couldn’t be an airplane pilot or a pro-basketball player in the sighted league. But neither could most people. It takes a very specific set of abilities and skills to excel at those jobs and you don’t have to be what is considered “disabled” today to be out of the running. I also couldn’t be a banker, because I am constitutionally incapable of focusing on money that much. We would all continue to have different talents and ability levels in specific areas.

In a fully adapted world, not everyone would be suited to every job. But everyone would have some useful and appreciated talent. Technology would help in in many cases but it would no longer be surprising that a blind person or a person with a wheelchair is a successful professional.

A few more details just for me

Everybody has their own specific needs and with the development of technology I hope that some things will become more affordable that would help me to do things as fast as everyone else.

For example, I would love to have talking measuring cups or even an electronic mixing bowl that would measure or weigh ingredients audibly as I put them into the bowl. Another thing that would allow me to cook my family’s meals better and faster would be small electronic chips on my jars and containers of ingredients that would make a small sound when called for. The calling could be done from a cell phone through a voice activation system like Siri or Alexa.

I enjoy gardening and one of my pet peeves about my vision is that it is very hard to weed when I cannot see the difference between my small plants and the weeds. A technological solution in the future might be a program on a camera mounted on glasses that could be taught through a push of a button to recognize young plants at a certain stage of development. I could then find one of the plants I want to preserve, point the camera at it, push a button and dictate to the program what plant this is (since plant identification programs aren’t yet very accurate with very young plants). I could do the same with common weeds.

Then as I weeded the program could give me a running commentary of which plant the camera was pointed at. It might not be 100 percent accurate, but given the very specific identification in the immediate environment, it would likely be quite good. Beyond that, maybe someday scientists will develop gardening gloves with sensors on the finger tips that can differentiate between various plant DNA. I’m getting a bit sci-fi here but the fundamental technologies exist.

Like many people with mobility disabilities, I watch the development of ever more flexible mobility devices and ever lighter and stronger batteries with great interest. I recently saw a two-wheeled wheelchair like vehicle based on a Segway which can handle light off-road terrain. It’s currently prohibitively expensive, but the technology is there to allow me to get back into nature on the hiking trails I used to enjoy even through the pain of mobility impairment. I hope more and more devices will be made for people who are physically active, strong and well-balanced, but who have joint or bone difficulties that make off-road movement difficult.

I would love it if there was a program using a camera mounted on glasses that would help a blind person aim at a basket in basketball or strike at a baseball with a bat. It could be done but it would require the athlete to develop a lot of skill in responding instantly to the signals. But then, every athlete needs a lot of practice.

When I was a parent of young children, I tried to find some sort of bracelet that my toddlers couldn’t take off that would help me keep track of them with even greater accuracy. I got very good at telling exactly where my toddlers were and what they were doing by hearing. But a locator that could be called or which would make a noise if the child exited a prescribed area would have made our family life less rigidly controlled.

As it was, I had to have gates everywhere and be extra vigilant. It was doable but required a huge effort that could have been put into more fun and relaxation in those magical years with young children.

Those are all the things I can think of just now. I realize that I didn’t include anything in there about making visually beautiful things accessible to people with vision impairments. I would love it if museums always made tactile replicas of interesting and fragile exhibits so that people with vision impairments (as well as the world’s much more numerous tactile learners, such as nearly all children) could touch them.

But when it comes to seeing a sunset or a mountain vista, I actually really enjoy these already. I’m not totally blind, of course, and there is a need for writers to continue to have jobs creating endless and wonderful descriptions for those who are. but I believe beauty is something we all experience in our own ways. We can try to share it with people who perceive the world differently, but the truth is that all of us are “differently abled” in that regard.

Final thoughts

When I envision a world that is fully adapted so that I would no longer be “disabled” or “restricted,” it turns out that this imaginary world would be better for everyone else too. OK, some people might have to get their driving fix through video games or on special sports ranges, but with climate change, they’re going to have to do that anyway. And really is one hobby actually more important than the 20 percent of the population who cannot drive for one reason or another?

But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where, in the state of Oregon, Jennifer Gayman (and every other person with some mobility difficulty who also cannot drive) is made to be severely disabled. This whole experience—seeing that news story and doing this thought experiment—has changed the way I feel about the word “disabled,” which I used to think was a reasonable factual descriptor.

In a lot of situations, we may have to start referring to some of us as “restricted” or “banned” people, because it isn’t the abilities of our bodies doing this to us, but rather the artificial constructs of society. When the benefits of available technology are denied to us, either by law or by economic marginalization, we are “restricted,” not “disabled.”

While I was writing this post, my father went and talked to the local police department where I will be living in Oregon and obtained an exception for me to be able to use a mobility scooter in that small town. I’ll have to mark it with large disability signs, which I really don’t mind personally. It’s the fact that my reprieve is limited to one town and even one generation of local officers that is worrying.

I will likely never live to see the adapted society I describe fully realized, but I do hope that I might just see a day when these kinds of restrictions imposed by society on me and many others are viewed the same way we now view racism or transphobia—at least by allies. We’ve been asked to wait our turn for inclusion for a long time. I hope our time will come.

The curses and the blessings of tradition

When I was a young adult I was a bit sad that my family “had no traditions.” By this I actually meant that we had very little that we carried on from previous generations. My parents generation made a fairly clean break from their parents, not just in my family but in the families of most of our close friends.

We didn’t know the blessings or the curses of long-standing family or community or spiritual traditions. Many of the traditions my parents rejected were toxic, abusive or just unhelpful in modern times. There was Klan involvement in one brach of the family and traditions of family dysfunction in another branch. I was never sorry my parents left that stuff behind and there seemed precious.little of value that they left.

But I was melancholy that we came from such a background, one where our parents had to make that break. And I was young enough that I didn’t yet realize either the great value of the new traditions we created or the real possibility of digging further back than the generations that had become so tainted by abuse, racism and misogyny.

Creative Commons image by Shadowgate

Now after living twenty-two years in another country with my husband’s family traditions at the fore, I do see both the blessings and the curses. And as my compass swings homeward I have a lot to think about.

May 1, the upcoming Beltane celebration in Bohemia, is one of my favorite holidays. I was born in April and grew up amid wildflowers. I guess I’m still kind of a flower child at heart.

I love the idea of a community dancing around a maypole, bedecked with flowers, holding colorful ribbons, laughing, singing, flirting and imbibing something that induces giddiness. But let’s face it, that isn’t really how it mostly pans out.

The one year when I did actually manage to build a maypole in my yard and get some people together to dance around it, I was worked ragged taking care of everything myself, cooking for a crowd, fielding my husband’s resistance to anything that smacks of my spirituality and juggling two emotionally needy adopted toddlers. We got one nice picture but all I remember is exhaustion and conflict.

Most years it wasn’t even an option because we went to my husband’s home village in South Bohemia for Beltane. The tradition there is still alive and kicking. There is a feisty competition between the small villages among the local carp-farming ponds over whose maypole is the tallest. There are even bands of young men who drive around on the eve of Beltane trying to catch their neighbors drunk and dosed off, so that they can cut down their pole.

The poles are raised and the main celebration happens on the evening of April 30. The whole village gathers on the green. A huge bonfire is laid and children bring ragged effigies of “witches” to burn in it. First, girls and women decorate the very top of the maypole with ribbons. Then, it is raised in the old way with teams of men hauling on long two-by-fours propped under the towering hundred-foot tree trunk.

When it is secured upright in a gigantic phallic statement of the village’s honor, the bonfire with all the tattered female figures is lit and the real festivities begin with lots of loud pop music, beer and sausage.

I have enjoyed those festivities many times and felt thankful that my husband’s village kept some old traditions alive. But since my mother-in-law, a level-headed, behind-the-scenes matriarch, died several years ago, extended family dynamics have become increasingly toxic, and the misogynist aspects of the Beltane tradition now appear painfully obvious. This year we’re still on lockdown, but even if we weren’t, I’m no longer sure it is such a good environment for kids.

At the same time there is debate over a Czech Easter tradition, another one with ancient roots and a misogynist twist. The. Monday after Easter, Czech children (previously only boys but now of both genders) go door-to-door, reciting poems while holding ribbon-adorned wands or whips made of willow rods. They lightly tap their wands against the backsides of any women in each household. The women then give them candy and colored eggs.

It’s like trick-or-treating on a spring morning with poetry instead of scary costumes. What isn’t to love?

Weeeell…. the older tradition had only men and boys doing the “caroling” as it’s called. And the wands are apparently supposed to be whips with which to extract treasures from the women. In fact, in many places, grown men also circulate through the village, receiving shots of alcohol in lieu of candy and eggs. And I’ve felt the sting of a purposefully wielded willow whip on occasion.

Many foreigners insist that this Czech tradition is rotten to the core with misogyny. I still have a soft spot for tradition though, left over from my uprooted childhood, and I see ancient roots in this ritual. Most caroling traditions emerged from community need and the sharing of resources. In this one, instead of the poor exchanging music and cuteness for winter treats, it is men coming to women as supplicants with small personal versions of the beribboned maypole and receiving—traditionally at least—eggs, the most potent symbol of fertility and the continuation of life.

Some claim that men are the ones with the power in this ritual because the willow wands are supposed to bestow fertility, beauty and good health on the women, who provide the eggs in gratitude. One friend even speculates that the tradition is a reenactment of the aftermath of the Maidens’ War, a half-myth, half-historical gender-based conflict in eighth-century Bohemia, in which matriarchal and priestess power in the area was finally defeated.

In any event, the tradition is clearly Pagan, which is why the caroling is relegated to Monday, so as not to bother anyone still practicing Christianity in “the most atheist country on earth.” But more than that, I hear the echo of an ancient women-honoring tradition in this ritual. though it certainly has been put to misogynist use.

Our modern view of procreation, fertility and the continuation of life has been turned into a matter of mechanics. The sperm goes in that hole. The egg comes from that thing. The fetus grows in there and the baby comes out that hole. It’s like a very slow vending machine. And women get treated with about as much respect.

But in ancient times, when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, people might have known in some sense how babies are made, but much of the details was a mystery. And it was quite clear that women held the key to that mystery. That meant that women were at the center of any community and held in a place of honor.

They might not have had all the decision-making power, but they were the givers of life. They didn’t simply give life as a “thank you” for being poked. The continuation of life was the whole point of the community, of the whole shebang. So, I don’t buy the “men bless women with the phallic symbol and then women give life as a token thank you” bit as the ancient origin of the Czech Easter ritual. It doesn't add up.

The ancient origin, regardless of how twisted and changed the ritual has become, is about men in need, asking for the continuation of life and women giving it from a place of honor and power. That’s Czech Easter in a nutshell.

Creative Commons image by Shadowgate

And the witches burned in the fire at Beltane? That too is a modern misogynyst twist on an ancient tradition. Originally the “witch” was supposed to be the goddess or spirit of winter. Fires were lit to mark the turning of seasons and the turning of life to death to life again all over ancient Europe. But today a mere bonfire has lost that awesome power. It is just something to drink beer around and to turn what is of little value to ash.

It all begs the question: Is my soft spot for tradition a foolish impulse?

Traditions cause so much havoc in the world after all. Restrictive religions cause untold pain and suffering in families when parents try to force their children to follow them. National traditions lead to nationalism and bigotry and even play a role in war. Maybe my parents were right to abandon tradition entirely, even if there had been anything there worth salvaging.

Yet, there is another holiday our family celebrates in the spring. That is International Roma Day on April 8. Previously there was some kind of celebration to go to with other families. This year is hard for so many reasons. I managed to make a traditional Romani meal, watch some of our Romani language videos and talk about Romani celebrities with my son. That was about it. At the end of the day, I sat on the edge of my son’s bed and asked him what he remembers about the Romani history we’ve learned over the years.

“It’s boring,” he said, turning away defensively.

Hard and painful is more like it. There was slavery, the Holocaust, reeducation boarding schools, followed by educational segregation, discrimination and ostracism. And he’s seen some of the latter first hand. I promise him that in America, where we are moving in just a few months, most people will think having Romani heritage is pretty cool. No one will harass him about it and they won’t think his skin is all that dark, since the population there is much more diverse.

“I don’t care,” he says. “I only like halushky.”

Halushky is the Romani meal I made—a miraculous recipe without measurements given to me by a Romani language teacher when my children were toddlers. I let the subject drop for now. But I will carry these little bits of tradition with us across the water. Because there is one thing I know for sure that tradition is good for.

All the painful things in Romani history were at their most basic an attempt to stamp out tradition, a people, a way of life. A lot of Neo-Nazis in Central Europe today don’t have a real problem with Roma as long as they don’t know they are Roma and they don’t have any of their old traditions.

We don’t have much from my children’s birth culture, but I know one thing. All the people who survived terrible things in order that my children could live, survived because of traditions of strength and resilience. And my son may not care about it now, but I will keep the memory for the day when he might because these distant echoes were worth fighting for then and they still are.

Maybe the same holds for those of us who still practice earth-honoring, healthy traditions elsewhere. There is an awful lot of toxicity and misogyny that has got in the way. But it is worth wading through it to grasp at the echoes of what was good in our traditions. Because we may not know the names and faces of those who fought to keep those echoes alive through earlier invasions, genocides, plagues and famines, but we know they fought and struggled and won because if they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be able to hear the echoes at all. They would be entirely lost.

I keep on struggling to keep what is good in our traditions alive and to regenerate what is only a thin echo because losing those last echoes would be allowing the forces of oppression, genocide and misogyny to win the last battle. Even if I recreate some completely new tradition that is good and healthy, it would mean saying to those who fought against such great odds to keep the echoes alive that they didn’t matter.

My son is coming to America, and for him alone, it might not matter if he knows he’s Roma. But it would matter to those who fought so hard through unimaginable hardship to keep their traditions alive. So, I’ll carry that too.

The long road to "That isn't on me."

A young girl wrote wrenching words to a group I’m in. So young. A pretty, thin teen with charcoal hair, umber skin and eyes that clearly move non-traditionally. .

She said she was struggling with the concept that she would never be able to do so many things she wanted to because she was born blind: ”I wanted to drive a car, sneak out with friends, go to parties, have a sleep over… And I wanted to see and flirt with cute guys. That was the life i was excited for. Now I’m realizing it wasn’t meant for me.”

A lot of people wrote back, telling her to believe in herself, not to set limits on her dreams. “Blindness doesn’t have to define you…” But others admonished her for appearing to ask for sympathy, even though this was a support group for blind people, not exactly mixed company. “Don’t fish for pity…” Yadda yadda yadda….

But I read her words over again and sat lost in thought. This girl wasn’t limiting her dreams. I don’t hear her saying she can’t be a scientist or a professional athlete or president. I hear her saying some very real things. Yup, driving a car is out for us. We learn that early on.

But then there are the other things—the social life, the little crowd of friends, the parties, the giggling under the covers when a friend spends the night, the staying out ‘til the streetlights come on or sneaking out afterwards.

Image via Pixabay - Two girls with arms around each other’s shoulders pumping their fists with a bleak gray background.

That isn’t a girl limiting her dreams. She has a couple of friends, kids of her parent’s friends, who have known her since before her difference was “weird.” But they also have their crowd and the cost of inviting along one’s geeky blind childhood friend with the creepy eyes is steep. There may be someone out there who would do it, but most blind kids aren’t lucky enough to have a badass, social daredevil for a friend.

This girl isn’t limiting her dreams or fishing for pity. She’s just expressing sorrow over coming to grips things that are denied to her. She’s young and she has probably been told she can do “anything, even if you’re blind” by people who mean well and who also don’t want to feel uncomfortable emotions. And she’s starting to find out that it’s not entirely true.

If she is making a mistake, it is only in lumping the social things together with driving a car, as if they too were a natural consequence of blindness. They aren’t. But I didn’t know that when I was that age either.

I remember being fourteen and noticing the blurry sunlight in my bedroom window turn orange, signaling the end to another solitary Saturday in June, listening to the happy yells of teenagers in the alley through that open window. That day—for the first time—I knew where the party was. Someone had let it slip within my hearing at school. I didn’t know who lived there, but it was just a couple of blocks over.

I put on my jean jacket, which had once been fashionable back when I went through a phase of studying fashion and trying really hard to be “with it.” I put my hair in a scrunchy and walked the two blocks to the place where the party was happening. I put a smile on, carefully rechecking it internally—not too big or obvious but enough to be friendly. The door was open with music blaring out, so I walked up the steps past a couple of guys sitting out front.

No one acknowledged me. I couldn’t see their faces. But my little bit of residual sight and their breathing and low conversation told me they were all guys. They might not even really know me, but I could tell they were my age, not grownups. I slipped into the doorway, which was festooned with streamers. The bold, cheerfully brash tones of the 1980s screeched from speakers and the sound inside was so loud that most of my skill at echolocation was wiped out.

There were girls dancing just inside. I could tell by their dim silhouettes and their giggles. There was a burst of laugher and someone slammed into me, pushing me against the wall and sloshing a drink across my chest. The girls erupted into gales of laughter. Then they were gone, scurrying away into the crowd of amorphous shapes.

I looked down and sniffed. Sprite. Well, at least it was clear and only a bit of my shirt was wet. I was used to rough and tumble with two brothers, so I wasn’t immediately sure that I wasn’t welcome. I stood against the wall for a long time, observing as best I could and trying to look friendly and “with it.”

I could hear the occasional voice I recognized from school. I didn’t know the names to go with those voices. The other kids were only ever introduced at the beginning of the year and then they only said their name out loud once in home room. That wasn’t enough to capture the voices and put names to the kids nearest me in school. But after a few months I did know when kids from my class were close by from their familiar voices.

Even so, no one spoke to me. A few dancers stepped on my toes or pushed me aside a bit with gradually increasing force. But no one directed so much as, “oops!” to me.

Finally, someone whose face I couldn’t see came up and took my shoulders, steering me toward the door. And I went. I made sure I was steady enough to keep them from pushing me down the steps, but I didn’t resist. I walked home along the sidewalk, my head up, pretending I didn’t care.

It wasn’t the first time I experienced that kind of cold shoulder and rejection, and it wasn’t the last by a long shot. But it was the last time I tried just going to a party put on by my classmates that I had heard about. And it was the only private party for teens I went to during high school.

Nope. No one ever invited me. There were a couple of kids I was friends with at the three different schools I attended during my teens, but they weren’t either the partying type or in a position to throw a party.

Is not getting invited to parties the worst thing in the world? Of course not. I lived in a sheltered, nice small town. I didn’t have to worry about hunger, violence or familial abuse. A lot of teens have terrible problems that I didn’t have. But when I crept out my window on Halloween to roam the streets, I did it alone, a real ghost walking in the dusk with kids speeding by, shouting and laughing in their own pursuits.

I wanted so badly to be part of a happy and inclusive crowd, to feel friends’ arms around my shoulders from either side, to share my excitement with someone, to laugh at their jokes and to know that if I fell behind they’d reach out pull me along because I was one of the pack.

All these years later, I know what the pretty teenage girl is talking about. I listened to well-meaning adults back then. I went to a self-esteem building program called “Wings” and I chanted affirmations before going to bed every night. All those messages from adults warned me that the worst thing a person with a disability can do is to complain or elicit sympathy from others.

Now, with the experience of an extra thirty years, those people telling this girl not to “put limits on her dreams” or “fish for pity” make me want to gnash my teeth.

Instead, I wrote to her: “I hope you know that you can do all those things as well as anyone, with the sole exception of driving a car. The problems you have doing these things are what we call a ‘social construct.’ It isn't ‘meant to be.’ It isn’t God or biology or your body that has taken those things from you. I snuck out of a windows as a teenager. I was quite good at it in fact. But no friends ever did it with me because I had eyes like yours. These things were ‘off-limits’ only because of social constraints.”

“As for putting limits on one’s dreams, I have been a war correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, a major international publication. I have published ten books and travelled in 35+ countries. I am raising two kids. I have built rock walls with my own hands. I have fed my family by farming the land. Believe me. I am not a blind person who puts limits on myself or spends time in self pity or in fishing for other people’s sympathy.”

“But society does put limits on me. For years, I beat myself up mentally because I wanted what you want and I thought it was me that was the problem. I thought I should learn to accept it. That’s what my mentors told me. And they didn’t blame me exactly but they implied that the exclusion was my fault, or at least a consequence of being visually impaired. I thought I just needed to try harder.”

“Now I’m almost forty-five and I want to tell you that that is bullshit. Certainly, avoid putting limits on your dreams. But your words don’t sound like that to me. I was a nice, friendly girl with a ton of interests and a good sense of humor. But I didn’t get to go to parties and I had precious few sleepovers, almost entirely with the kids of my parent’s friends. I didn't limit myself. Society and prejudiced people did. I was outgoing and friendly. I got kicked down, told ‘Oh, it's just for us and a few close friends!’ or ‘Maybe sometime!’ or just given a cold shoulder so many times there is no counting. That's society. That's prejudice, even bigotry. Call it what it is. Don’t blame yourself and I hope the people telling you to try harder and implying you are fishing for sympathy are reading this too, because putting this on you is abusive.”

“I wish I could give you a hug. I hope you will find your own dreams and follow them. But I’ve also got to tell you that this crap that is social exclusion has nothing to do with you. It’s all on them. I’m sorry to say that it isn’t likely to change soon, but you will find the occasional person who is open-minded and a real friend. Value them and give them your best side. Try not to let the negativity of bigots make you bitter, so that you can still turn around and be a good friend to those who are ready. But don't blame yourself because it just isn't about the blindness. It's about the same old sickness of our society that brings racism, sexism and all the rest of it.”

That may seem harsh, calling kids “bigots” because they don’t invite the blind girl in their class to a casual party. But that is actually putting it mildly and with a large dose of emotional distance.

I did meet a new friend that same year—when I was fourteen—who was ready to be friends with the blind girl next door. At least a little. Like a lot of friends, she didn’t act like she knew me in public. That was okay with me. Or at least it was worth the price. She was a good friend and we shared real interests, like the medieval history club.

Life happened and even though my life took me away from that small town and around the world over the next couple of decades, circumstances brought that friend a lot closer and into the circle of my family. There have been a lot of times when social things were tough, and I’d think of the handful of people I could really count on—my friend from that old neighborhood among them, even though thousands of miles lay between us. We’ve supported each other through some very tough times.

This past year, divisions split many friends in the US and while we agree on almost everything, there were some things we didn’t see eye to eye on. There came a moment when my friend was so angry that she lashed out at me in text.

As happens with a lot of arguments, my friend made it personal. But instead of just calling me argumentative or selfish or closed-minded or insulting my sources—all things that could at least be rationally argued—she went for my disability and my writing about my experiences, accusing me of making up the social difficulties related to my disability in order to “manipulate people and get sympathy.” To be clear, the argument wasn’t even vaguely related to disability or social exclusion.

I know my blogs have increasingly become about disability issues and maybe it bothers more than just this friend. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read my blogs, whatever your reasons. And I can see that it might seem like I obsess about this stuff, if you go on what I write here.

But the truth is that I rarely talk about these things in offline life. Last night, I mentioned something about my vision to a local friend because I had just spent the day seeing a major eye specialist in the city, and I was surprised at her shock. Then, I realized that I never talk about this stuff in person, even something innocuous like saying that I went to the eye doctor.

I spend most days thinking about kids, chickens, gardening, teaching students, preparing lessons, cleaning, cooking, doing the dishes, making crafts and now homeschooling. I don’t have a lot of time for disability issues, even being socially isolated enough that Covid lockdown barely changed my life at all.

Maybe that’s partly why I write about it, because it is an otherwise neglected part of my life. But I know it is also because these are issues I don’t hear anyone else talking or writing about. Or at least very little. And yes, while I don’t focus on the social impacts of disability every day, they underlie my whole life. They are defining factors that I have to take into account, like gravity or Covid. But unlike universal restrictions, that social exclusion is something I observe only affecting me and other people with disabilities.

So, I write because it is needed and silence hurts.

I don’t write this stuff to garner sympathy, and that’s fortunate because I haven’t received much sympathy since I started writing here. Instead, I have developed some great connections with people who experience similar things or who want to understand reality better. But even that isn’t really the point. The point is that I am a journalist. I write the things that need to be told and things that the world needs to hear. That’s just what I do.

If you’re a reader who came to my blogs for the general social justice stuff or to see what it’s like to live in the Czech Republic or to get books or to learn about herbs or earthy spirituality and you find my posts about social exclusion, disability and societal prejudices to be uncomfortable and out of touch with the reality you know, I hope you’ll bide a moment with your discomfort. It is okay to feel uncomfortable.

When someone tells about social injustice that they experience, the rest of us often feel an obligation to do something. And that is why it can seem like they are complaining or trying to manipulate others. But the fact is that there is no specific action I am asking for. It is really the understanding and the awareness that will help. If anything, share a post that opens you up to a new and uncomfortable reality.

But mostly just be open to the perspective. That openness alone will create the change we all need in this troubled world.

It is a stereotype like any other negative stereotype, that people with disabilities—or at least some of them—are “fakers” and “complainers.” Partly that stereotype comes from the (often-subconscious) fear abled people have of the inevitable disabilities of old age.

Partly it comes from the kind of jealousy my children have of adults. “You don’t have to do chores and homework!” They can’t see how much adults do have to do. Abled people see disabled people getting a few little curb cuts in life, and many think we have it easy and enjoy a little mooching… or that SOME of us must be faking or exaggerating just to get the bennies or at least to garner a little sympathy.

Just like I explain these things to my kids, you have really got no idea. The only breaks disabled people actually get are things that society has figured out will make us cost society a lot less because they allow us to deal with our own lives by ourselves better. That’s it.

Frankly, the only time I ever got “sympathy” for being blind was one time when I was a kid and some lady at a bus station prayed over me and it was a distinctly strange and uncomfortable experience. Most people with disabilities avoid “sympathy” like the plague for precisely that reason. It might feel moderately good from the giving end, but it is usually really weird and unrewarding on the receiving end. And that’s real sympathy, not even the toxicity of pity.

More than anything, if there is one thing I do want to try to manipulate people into it is to refrain from making abusive and prejudiced remarks that hurt people with disabilities. It doesn’t really matter if you once somewhere heard about a person faking a disability to get something or an actually disabled person trying to manipulate people’s sympathy, please don’t use that stereotype as an accusation or an automatic way to discredit a person with a disability in a disagreement.

That accusation is exactly like using racial epithets or calling a woman the slang equivalent of “sex worker.” If you go there in an argument, it isn’t about the argument or the person you’re arguing with. That’s on the person using the bigoted remark. It is a sickness that is within those fostering prejudice.

That isn’t on me. It isn’t on us.

Postcards from American social studies class

It has been a month since I pulled my son out of Czech school mid-week and put him in an American online elementary school. It’s been a month of complete reorientation. I even feel like I have jet lag.

Our living room now looks like a homeschooler lives here. We aren’t technically allowed to homeschool because of Czech authorities, but we have been able to enroll in an American online school, thanks to technology that has only existed for a few years. And even with school online the physical environment is starting to look different.

Now we are surrounded by three US maps (two of them in puzzle form), a daily schedule on the wall, science projects involving balloons, makeshift beakers and lots of rocks, a writing lab and color-coded notebooks with big bold labels in English. This isn’t how Czechs do school. My son’s previous school room had piles of identical gray notebooks—six or more per class—a couple of textbooks and nothing with color or three dimensions.

Image by Arie Farnam

In other rooms of the house, I am packing and stacking boxes. I came here twenty-two years ago with a single backpack, a laptop and equipment to make a documentary film. In a few months, I’ll be going back. One acquires things in twenty-two years—important things… and people. I’ll be heading back with two kids and about ten large boxes full of books, clothes, special dishes, candle-making equipment, herbalist paraphernalia, children’s toys, board games and much smaller electronics.

I’ll still be leaving behind a lot of value—the huge wooden table my Egyptian carpenter friend made for me, my antique sewing machine, my house, my garden, my animals, a husband. This isn’t all celebration. There is a lot of loss and heartache.

This morning I realized for the first time that we will technically meet the definition of refugees. We are leaving because of community harassment and particularly racially motivated physical and psychological attacks on my son, from which authorities refuse to protect us.

Sure, unlike most refugees, we actually have a pre-set safe harbor to go to. We have citizenship and an apartment already waiting, But still… this isn’t how I ever imagined going home.

The ever-intensifying Covid lockdowns here leave us in a limbo where we might as well have already crossed the ocean. A thick blanket of fine sifted snow has fallen and the temperature has been well below freezing.

We haven’t seen neighbors even poke their noses out of doors in days. But we are out and about, feeding animals, sledding, snowboarding, skating on a nearby pond and shoveling snow. It’s a wonderfully quiet and blissfully unthreatening world for a change with only the sounds of neighborhood dogs and a few engines down on the county road.

Our trans-Atlantic transition has already begun. I’ve got the measuring cups out and we’ve been baking—preparing for a world of cups, ounces, pounds, quarts, gallons, feet and inches. My son is justifiably confused.

“Why, Mama, why do Americans do this? Centimeters are lots easier!”

Oh honey, you have no idea.

The complexity isn’t just in units of measure by a long shot. Europeans don’t study fractions much, which are mostly a consequence of weird American units of measure.

And did you know that European and American cursive handwriting differ significantly? No wonder I haven’t been able to read handwriting for the past twenty years! I thought my eyes were just getting worse. But as it turns out, almost all the capital letters are different and many of the lower-case letters are quite different.

Of course, there is the whole language thing. I didn’t get out of home teaching by going for American school, even if the online teachers do actually teach concepts. My son needs vocabulary help roughly every two and a half minutes, and that definitely includes math class.

The most foreign class though is social studies. Czechs do have a somewhat similar class. It is called “homeland studies,” and is completely nationally focused. In fourth grade, American social studies is quite similar actually—just with information about a different country. A few concepts, like how to read an elevation map, are transferable, but all the facts are, of course, different.

Before enrolling in American school, my son could just barely find the United States on a world map, primarily because “Grandma lives there.” (Not to mention a passel of cousins.) But that’s as far as his knowledge of America went—to my dismay. I thought I’d done a half-way decent job, importing hundreds of American children’s books over the years, many of them about American history or regional cultures. But apparently my son assumed these were every bit as much fantasy as the fairytales and let them go in one ear and out the other.

The social studies teacher in our new school is also the weakest of the teachers, in terms of teaching style and even knowledge base. He’s a middle-aged guy from Ohio named Todd, and I was warned by reviewers that this school has a conservative bent.

But even so, I was disturbed when the first lesson was on the hemispheres of the earth and the teacher insisted that the earth has four hemispheres—northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest. “Hemi-sphere” means “half of a ball.” You can’t have four halves of one ball.

Next, the teacher just goofed. He was trying to explain to the kids how landforms have an impact on weather patterns. One of the simplest examples of this comes from my home turf in Eastern Oregon, where the Cascade Mountains block the wet sea air from the Pacific Ocean to the west and force it to rise, cool and dump all of its moisture before continuing on to the eastern part of the state. That’s why Eastern Oregon and Washington are mostly desert.

But Todd from Ohio got his mountain ranges mixed up and insisted that it is the Rocky Mountains that block the wet air from the Pacific, despite the fact that the Rockies don’t really start until you get into Idaho. And he put it on the unit exam.

But those things are non-controversial, just mistakes, that in reality any teacher makes. We just don’t usually have to teach our classes with parents looking in, analyzing and rewinding the video recording to harp on every little thing. So, I wrote to Todd and told him about the issue gently and I don’t hold it against him. (Well, the bit about the earth’s hemispheres counts against him maybe just a smidgen.)

But the real trouble started in the unit titled “Who are Americans?”

First, the teacher proclaimed that all Americans are immigrants. He made a point of calling out any Native American kids watching and specifically denigrating anyone who says Native Americans are not immigrants. He explained the archeological land bridge theory, though he neglected to mention that this is our best guess as to how Native Americans got there. Mostly it was his tone that was irritating at this point.

But then he made a point of insisting that those first migrating humans or pre-humans were also immigrants and thus “all Americans come from immigrants.” First of all, this isn’t technically correct. “Immigration” describes the movement of specific persons from one inhabited country to another inhabited country. An immigrant goes “in” among those already there and does it during their own lifetime.

The people who crossed the land bridge, if that is indeed how it happened, were not immigrants. They were nomads. They didn’t make the trip all in one lifetime. It took many generations. They didn’t go to live in another country. They just slowly moved around and eventually found themselves on a different continent.

Now, I’m not Native American and I don’t know if Native Americans care whether or not they are considered to be the descendants of immigrants or not. But I do care about the evident reason Todd was making this assertion—to prepare kids to believe that Europeans had every bit as much right to the land of North America as Native Americans did back in the 1400s. That’s a problem.

If that were true any invader could just declare themselves immigrants to any country and might would always make right.

Furthermore, If Todd were right about all Americans being immigrants, it would mean that Europe is a continent of immigrants too… and Asia and Australia as well. The only continent with any claim to having indigenous people would be Africa and all humans would either have to be considered indigenous Africans or African diaspora of various time periods. That is clearly unhelpful and not the meaning of the concepts involved.

This is where the fundamental building blocks of a vast social misunderstandings start—at least some of them. Conservatives in the US have long complained that teaching the facts of US history constitutes the shaming of the white portion of the nation. As a result, I had to learn much of this history outside school from reading and from experiences with people. The primary shame I ever felt over it was that we didn’t learn it in primary school.

This is a political ploy in the classroom. I’ve heard right-wing politicians say the same thing on TV, “we all came as immigrants and we all had the same opportunities.” It’s a comfortable falsehood to shake off uncomfortable feelings that arise from acknowledging historical and present-day injustices.

In the next unit, Todd opened up the topic of the economy of the United States. He defined “free market economics” as “a system where you can make as much money as you want. You decide how much money you will make.”

Creative Commons image by Kath B. of Flickr.com

He never hinted that you don’t just get to say, “Oh, I’d like to make $200,000 please,” and it’s done. Well, I suppose that Todd had that option because he’s an abled white man from a privileged socio-economic background, so maybe he actually thinks that’s an option for everybody. He does point out that he chose to be a teacher, even though it doesn’t pay as much as some other things. But he never hints that not everyone gets to simply point to a dollar amount and choose their salary, as if it is an ice-cream flavor.

Next, Todd addresses America’s political system. America is “unique,” he says, because it is a democracy. He digs deeper into the idea that America is alone in being a democracy when he defines the concept of a political region as “America is a democracy, so that is a political region,” as if the border around the United States was the border around the democratic region of the world.

This, despite the fact that the fairly conservative Pew Research Center found in 2019 that more than half of the countries in the world are now democratic.

And then this morning, a whopper that left me breathless. In discussing America’s borders and neighbors, the teacher claimed that the Mexican-American war was a border dispute over which river should be the border. It was presented as a silly little argument in which the United States proved that the Rio Grande was the right border. In reality the Mexican-American war constituted a massive land-grab on the part of the Americans. It was so unjust that there were quite a few Americans who fought on the Mexican side. And when the United States won anyway, the border was moved and the USA gained 500,000 square miles of territory, increasing the nation’s size by a third. This was no minor squabble over “which river the border should follow.”

One of the ways I deal with the problems with social studies class is to supplement. I brought out the world-map puzzles and eventually my son got the idea of cardinal directions and the hemispheres of the earth. I also got a topographical map of the US. so we could study. the real positions of the mountain ranges and their effects on Eastern Oregon high desert country. And at the moment, we’re reading children’s books about the historical labor movement led by young women in textile mills for a bit of perspective on our economic system. We have books about Native American kids—both present-day and historical—as well.

But now I see the divide in American social studies education in all its glory. To be on the side of facts and history puts me in the position of sounding like I am constantly harping on some injustice or another. This isn’t the choice of those of us who care about our children understanding the real world. I am not in fact against America or focused on complaint and gloom. I don’t even think America is really any more unjust than the vast majority of countries in the world.

But when teachers strip out any sign of the injustices of the past and focus on the myth of glorious European “Founding Fathers,” it makes it hard for facts to come across as anything else.

I find myself longing for a social studies class that would just teach the facts and the story of the country and its many peoples with integrity in the first place. This was one of the reasons why I wanted to homeschool my kids early on, a dream I gave up on due to bureaucracy, special educational needs and the wishes of my children. That’s why I have all these picture and story books on historical, geographic and social matters.

To counteract the sense that even my. blog posts are often a litany of complaints in a world of unrelenting hardship and injustice, I let myself dream about the way I would teach social studies.

We’d build maps where the equator was actually in the middle of the map, rather than in the lower third. We’d sing the oceans and continents. We’d make food from various countries. We’d mix the same paints to get the various shades of brown that color all the peoples of the earth, including those of very light-brown hue. We’d read real or realistic fictional stories about children in different countries.

When we turned, as we eventually must in an American school, to a more in-depth exploration of the United States, we would first spend quite a long time on the first several thousand years of American history and study the physical regions of the country in that context. We would have to search to find child-friendly books and materials on Native American civilizations and we would study their many discoveries and the development of mature democracy in some of them.

Then we would move on to all the history that came after and the nation of immigrants that largely replaced those civilizations. We would study the stories of those immigrants, including real stories of children in those times. We would not look away from hardship, desperation or exploitation. We would see how even good intentions sometimes brought tragedy and not all intentions were good. We would look at how people in the past viewed those of other groups and how that influenced what they did.

We would look at the founding of the United States and the Constitution as significant events, but not as the all-defining, most important events they became in the social studies of my childhood. We would look at exactly who designed the Constitution and why and how they hoped it would work and what worked and what didn’t and how it has been changed and whether or not it now works better. We wouldn’t be looking for saints or devils but rather at people, who were shaped by their times and circumstances.

As we moved toward more recent history, we would have more stories of real people to work with. We’d break down myths and tell the stories with nuance. Rosa Parks would take her rightful place as a savvy, planful activist, rather than just someone who was too tired.

We would learn that there are rarely easy answers, and that while there are sometimes people with dishonorable intentions, most people throughout history took the actions that seemed right from their own perspective at that time. And yes, this would mean in the end that we would not be able to cover everything in one year, because nuance takes a little while, but we could cover it all in the end, since we wouldn’t spend every year repeating the same tired myths.

I hope—I have reason to hope from what I haver read—that there are schools in America that now teach social studies more like this. I have no illusions that we are returning to a country that is truly safer or gentler than the one we are leaving. We are simply going because we must go, due to clear and present danger, and that is the place we can find safe harbor just now.

Hope and peril at the dawn of a new epoch

Oh, the voice of Yolanda Adams singing Hallelujah!

My throat swelled and tears brimmed in the corners of my eyes. Yes, my lady, it has been a long, long night and that first pale light has come at last!

I had an extra reason to be choked up. The day of the inauguration was also the day my son started his new school. It’s still online, but it is functional. There are explanations. active teaching, smiles, help for those who struggle and clear goals—none of which were prevalent at his previous school. There is also a reasoned amount of work that he can finish without exhaustion, despair and tears.

Image via Pixabay

In mid-December our local schools opened for ten days and the bullying problem that had been growing in June roared back with a vengeance. I don’t know if it was just that the bullies were suffering from pent-up energy due to successive lockdowns or if it was because all the sports and after school clubs are still closed, but it was worse than ever before.

There were daily attacks. One day, a boy tricked my son into letting him “see” his phone and then he whacked it repeatedly against a tree, smashing it beyond all hope of repair. Four older boys lifted my son off the ground and slammed him down on his back, leaving bruises. Others threw rocks at him as he escaped on his bike. That was just one day.

He’s the only person of color in his school and he’s a softy—a kid who wouldn’t tell me about any of this because he hates confrontation more than anything.

But I found out from friends, and it turned out that a teacher had seen some of it, so I got my son’s permission to try to find out which teacher it was. The principal refused to let me seek out the teacher though, saying, “This was ten meters off school property. It is none of our concern.”

So yeah, I was researching schools after that.

It took weeks. I can’t drive and there is no other school within transportation range. There’s no specific bussing for schools here. And the US online public schools require physical presence in the right time zones. I searched and I searched and I searched.

For weeks on end, I ran across block after block, even with online schools. I’d think I had found a solution only to find out that it required documents I don’t have or cost more than my family’s entire monthly income. We had to have an actual online accredited school because getting approval for homeschooling in the Czech Republic is a bureaucratic nightmare of at least twelve months before you can start—and that’s IF you get approved.

Finally, I found a theoretical possibility and then I had to see if it would actually pass muster with Czech educational and social service authorities. A few days of nail biting, and it is looking good, so I yanked my son out of the endless drone of mandatory make-work without waiting for the end of the semester (or even the end of the day), and started the new program immediately.

He was watching his final required session from the old school while I worked out in front of the news. That’s when I heard Adams and I felt my spirit lift. Oh my, but there are moments that speak to the soul of a nation!

Then, I got my son set up on his first math class in the new school. The lesson was on place value, something he has always struggled with—despite knowing how to do most arithmetic. “Ah well, might as well start off with a bang,” I thought, and I hopped in the shower.

As I stepped out of the shower a few minutes later, I heard a sound even sweeter than Adam’s voice. (OK, possibly a mother might be biased.) My son yelled, “Oh, cool!”

Photo by Arie Farnam

In math class!

Over a place value lesson!

He wanted to show me, still dripping in a towel. “Mama, they explain it so much better!” In the evening, he did extra math problems “for fun,” because he was so elated to have finally conquered something that had plagued him for years.

That was his first class free from four years of tyranny.

Yup, dawn is breaking.

OK, even if you loved Yolanda Adams, you might find me a bit overly optimistic here. Surely, no one can stay excited about fourth grade math for long and the feeling of fresh air in politics isn’t likely to last much longer. Joe Biden isn’t exactly a progressive dreamboat and my son’s school science curriculum on climate and weather doesn’t even mention climate change. Their “social-emotional” course is so fake (not to mention weirdly cult-like) that we had to opt out.

And beyond that, the reasons so many Americans supported an egotistical, racist maniac remain and his supporters are still out there festering—and in some cases plotting violence and hate crimes. The bullies who found school such a convenient place to take out their frustrations on my son are still out in the parks and playgrounds, and they are particularly bored during Covid restrictions.

All is not perfect.

But gods, there is nothing like a few years of things being really bad to make one appreciate the imperfect and the halfway decent.

A few days later…

A lot of people in America are mulling the opportunities—and the perils—we now face. It isn’t that we’ve come down from the glorious hope of dawn after a long night. We’ve been thinking and talking about these things all along, but now is the time we need to really take a hard look.

My focus is on progressives and more broadly people who support the Democrats, because that’s who is in my circles, who I relate to, and the ball is now in our court.

So, here are the opportunities I see before us:

• Democrats in the federal government can now make policy. President Biden has begun it already. His initial moves about climate mitigation, immigration and Covid relief may have been partly a ploy to win the hearts of progressives, since he already got their fear-based ballots. But they were also much needed and they set a good tone.

• Those of us who value fairer voting systems, science-based public policy and education, fact-based discourse, compassion and empathy in society, broad inclusion, protection of the vulnerable, economic justice, equitable treatment for all, and the centering of marginalized voices have a chance to be heard in the current political and media climate. For at least some weeks and maybe even a couple of years, we have an opportunity to decide what concise and clear message we want large portions of the country to hear, because the media is primed for it and there is a theoretical way for political leaders to hear it.

• There are some who once supported Trump, who are disillusioned and are open to having civil conversation and possibly even changing their minds about a few things. OK, I make no claim to knowing how many of these there are, but I’ve seen some of them personally and seen evidence of more. Yes, some will hunker down and dig in, nursing hate and resentment. Some will just tune out and zone out. But some are open now. And IF they meet progressives who are kind, compassionate, open-minded, utterly factual, balanced and clear—some will change.

• As vaccines proliferate and the economy rebuilds, we have the opportunity of rebuilding in our lives and communities. And with that will come opportunities for healing. I think there will be a lot of scars from the traumas of the past several years, but healing is still healing, even when it leaves scars.

But as crucial to our consideration—if not more so—are the perils we are walking right straight into:

• We are pretty well aware that there is a danger that Biden and other mainline Democrats could squander the opportunities of this moment and either make deals where they give away the farm for a pittance or they could simply drift to the right over the next few months. This is something most progressives are pretty aware of and it appears from Biden’s early actions that he is aware we’re aware. It simply bears mention that vigilance will be necessary.

• Similarly, many of us are aware that Trump supporters, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and climate deniers are still out there. While some of them are disheartened and likely to zone out on beer, football and consumerism, many are stewing in their resentment and hate. If we don’t deal with the reasons why people turn to hate and conspiracy theories, as well as the reasons why people become so extreme that they are willing to participate in or tacitly support violence, this is going to come back to bite us—and very likely sooner rather than later. Some of the next few issues may exacerbate this one if those go unchecked.

• Much less discussed are the reactions to the coup attempt that could come back to haunt us even without the help of Trump supporters. The social media crackdown on Trump, his supporters and Covid-deniers in general is on a slippery slope.. I know. I get it. The rhetoric WAS harmful and it was also a serious source of stress in our lives. And as far as direct harm goes, social media companies are justified in banning repeat offenders. But banning a whole topic of discussion or some statements about scientific topics should be taken very seriously. Just because we are sure we understand what scientists are saying about Covid right at the moment doesn’t mean science doesn’t develop. Both in social media and in our off-line circles, we risk much by closing our minds to new information, contrary perspectives and questioning of authority.

• The ACLU has blown the whistle on policy discussions about how to further crack down on the right to protest and lift surveillance and privacy protections in order to combat right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism from white supremacists. And with good reason. I am NOT supporting neo-Nazis in any way and neither is the ACLU. But the fact is that the US government has all the policy and legal tools it needed to stop the attack on the Capitol. It just chose not to use them because the attackers were white and conservative. Any new policies in this area won’t just impact those groups. They will be general policies against public protest and against people outside the mainstream organizing. The next administration may well take those policies and use them against us. This goes back to the Geneva Convention. Whatever you do, remember that it can and will be done to you.

• Similarly, the so-called “liberal media” isn’t all that liberal on a lot of issues, but there have been a couple moments, especially around Covid, where journalists have been stepping out of objectivity and openly (as well is covertly) pushing a particular agenda. It’s all in the name of “supporting science,” but there was at least one time this past year when science didn’t support that agenda and the more progressive-friendly media actually did what Trump and his supporters accused them of doing. They bulldozed right through, using the words of scientists out of context and linking “children and super-spreaders” together again and again, despite the fact that even the most alarming studies of the pandemic show that children have a 0.5 spread ratio. By contrast, the flu has 1.2 and Covid among adults has more than 2.5. That 0.5 spread ratio is actually very low. When scientists said children CAN spread Covid, they meant just that. It is possible, though not likely. They did not mean that schools are super spreader hotbeds which should be closed while the real hotbeds, like meat packing plants, remain open. Keeping schools closed (and countless low-income parents out of work as a result) hurt the real small-people economy far more than closing certain types of workplaces, shuttering shopping beyond food and medicine and turning vegetarian for a while would have. But mostly schools have been the first to go and the last to reopen, due in no small part to the “children and super-spreaders” media ploy. Women, who bore the brunt of the home-teaching policy, were 40 percent more likely to have to give up their jobs due to Covid than men, and equity experts say women’s economic equality has been set back by decades. If this was truly the best way to fight Covid, the sacrifice may have been better accepted, but it wasn’t. In situations like this, we are at peril of using “supporting science” as a slogan without remembering that to support science means adopting a total openness to change your mind based on the evidence at hand, even if it means changing tack a few months into a crisis once the numbers are in.

• When any group is on a roll, there is a danger of confirmation bias. We have been clamoring for a return to facts for years now, and rightly so. But now that we have the ability to spread messages and make waves, we must be extra vigilant about our own truthfulness. Some of those who spread that factually flimsy “children and super-spreaders” slogan, admitted privately that it was “an exaggeration” but justified it by saying that too many people were bucking desperately needed public-health measures—like masks and social distancing—and anything that helped scare people into compliance was justified. But here’s the rub. Eventually, a lot of people will see through an exaggeration. And many will lose trust in media outlets, in all public health advice and in science-based policy in general. Public trust is severely shaken right now. In many places, even those who were initially very compliant with Covid restrictions are now flaunting them at a time when the pandemic is at its worst, not because of exhaustion but because they have come to assume restrictions are overstated and that officials who publicly tout them will privately flaunt them. It happened. The only way to win trust back in public discourse is through extreme truthfulness that is willing to admit mistakes, explain nuance and trust that MOST people will not be idiots when something like public health advice is carefully balanced. Check the facts before you repeat what you’ve heard, don’t exaggerate and admit mistakes. The next pandemic could easily be worse. The trust and voluntary compliance of vast numbers of people is the best defense.

• Finally, we face peril within the progressive movement itself from the demon of division and judgement. Our patience has been strained in so many ways and it shows. I’ve witnessed firsthand several (and heard of many more) examples of close friendships and family relationships broken up, not just because of the Trump versus Democrat divide, but also because of micro-differences among progressives. You think racial justice is more important than justice for LGBTQ+ people! Relationship cut. You think poor, white disabled people are underprivileged in any way comparable to black people! Not speaking anymore. You cite stats that school closures have exacerbated wealth and race inequality and have caused a surge in youth suicide instead of holding to the line that all costs are worth even one life saved from Covid! You’re worse than a Trumper! It sounds silly in black and white, but these are real divides, real relationships ruptured and deep rifts in a movement that has a tenuous chance to make some progress.

I am not a leader of anything. And I’m rather glad of that at the moment. This is a rugged time to be a progressive leader or even a Democratic elected official. There is a lot of pressure, some opportunities crying not to be missed and a whole lot of pitfalls. I’m just a scribe pointing them out.

Here’s a poem to close with.

Divide and conquer 

“We find our strength in open minds.
Always did. But always will?
We could stand side by side on the line,
Democrat and progressive, leftist and anarchist.
How many times did we hammer out agreements
In late night meetings with bleary eyes?
And yet when it came to the poll booth,
Our strength became our weakness.
Spoilers and small factions kept us down,
Against the rah rah juggernaut.
If the pulpit said it, they voted it. 
End of story. End of our hopes. 
Yet the few times we tried the strong arm,
It was terrible, much too bad to think on.
So, we say our strength is in open minds.
Today the tables have turned somewhat.
For once the juggernaut has been shaken.
Is there a line of insurrection some won’t cross?
Evangelicals in bed with old-style conservatives
And Nazis riding their coattails.
We might be able to use this,
Break the juggernaut, divide and conquer.
But our strength is in open minds.
If we take up their old tools of forced unity,
The half-truths and pressure tactics,
We might get victory and still lose everything
That mattered to us at the core.
If we divide from our body those who disagree,
Or cut away the wild ones and the rebels,
We will one day find that this more than anything
Was what made us who we are.
Our strength is ever in open minds.”

The spelling police and the only divide between people that actually. matters

Here’s a surreal one for the annals of social media logs. A heated discussion recently broke out in a Facebook group called Blind Penpals about typos and spelling errors in posts and the ethics of calling people out over them.

I joined this group some years ago as a way to support a social media acquaintance from Macedonia who reached out to me. She’s blind and she started this group to get more social interaction in her life. I didn’t feel the need to ask why she was isolated. Blind and visually impaired people are so often dismissed and forgotten (at best) no matter what country they live in.

The group was only a handful of people and she needed numbers to get it going. I had kids with intense needs and jobs and urban homesteading, the works. I didn’t have enough local community acceptance and still don’t, but I have never lacked for online connections and I didn’t really want a penpal. But I have enjoyed the occasional perspective from other blind and visually impaired people around the world.

Image via PIxabay

Thanks to the handful of Eastern Europeans who jumped in and spurred Facebook algorithms to put the group in search results, it now has 7,300 members. It’s an English-speaking group so most of those are people in the English-speaking, privileged West of the world. And thus the discussion about typos and spelling.

As my readers know, I’m a professional writer, but that doesn’t mean I never make spelling mistakes or typos. Part of this is just that I type fast and often have a kid or two yelling at me while I edit my posts. The other part is a consequence of being visually impaired.

First, I rarely read print. It is laborious, painful and slow for me to read even if the print is large. I have read out loud to my kids for eleven years because a parent reading, both the actual warm body and the warm, imperfect voice, have amazing scientifically demonstrated benefits for children, especially children who spent the first months of their lives in cold institutions without these things. But it’s a labor of love. It’s hard and I wouldn’t do it for anything less vital.

For everything else, I listen—to audiobooks, to podcasts, to text-to-speech articles, to audio descriptions of TV shows, even to voiceover on my phone.

As a result, I don’t see words over and over again like most people in today’s world. I don’t have the reinforcement of spelling and didn’t have it as a child. I routinely encounter words I want to include in a blog post that I am pretty sure I have never seen in print before. When I realize this consciously, I look them up.

But a lot of the time I don’t slow down enough to notice and I spell the way I spell. If the word is a homophone, the spellcheck doesn’t even catch it. And at other times my spelling guesses are so far off I can’t find the correct spelling even if I search online. If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, you’ll know what I mean.

But social media is much worse than blogs. When I blog, I write in relatively quiet moments and I go through and edit at least two or three times on each post. I post only every two weeks, so I have time to do that.

But social media is an ongoing conversation. It IS my social interaction and it is that for a lot of others during the pandemic and for a lot of people with disabilities even when there isn’t a pandemic. It’s like talking to people. I do it while I’m cooking dinner, fielding kids, digging up the garden, taking a five minute break from a translating job or standing in an elevator to the doctor’s office.

I can’t see much at all on the tiny screen of a phone and I use the accessibility settings to the hilt. I dictate nearly everything into my phone and I play back what I wrote, if there’s time. There often isn’t. When you speak into a speech-recognition app, there are going to be mistakes. I’ve gotten pretty good at using the technology. I know how to enunciate to increase my chances, but errors are still going to come up.

All this applies to most of the other blind and visually impaired people in the Blind Penpals group, except many of them learned English as a second language, have less residual sight than I have, have cheaper technology or have less education. Blind people never were very good with spelling and modern speech recognition technology may have made written communication a lot faster and easier for us but it generally increased the level of errors at the same time. I wasn’t the target of the shaming this time because I was one of the better spellers in the group, but the virtual heckling of others really got under my skin.

Last year, I was harried out of the local branch of Extinction Rebellion in no small part because of my error-ridden dictated messages in the group’s coordination system. No one ever said any of my messages were actually incomprehensible, but I had several major coordinating roles and I had to do a lot of messaging back and forth with volunteers.

I want to make clear here that Extinction Rebellion is an awesome movement and most of the volunteers are the best people in the world, who made me a cake to thank me for being their coordinator and were truly appreciative and cared not one iota about typos.

But there were a few people, particularly a coordinator who came from a more privileged background than most in the group, who couldn’t stand my errors or the way my messages sounded like someone speaking, rather than the clipped abbreviations which she preferred. After months of conflict over this issue and being banned from various activities she was overseeing, I left the group entirely to preserve my health and give my family some much needed TLC.

If I’d been younger, feistier and childless I probably would have stayed and fought for inclusion and maybe saved that XR branch from the disintegration that soon followed my exit. But my kids were in crisis, my health was suffering and the attacks were giving me PTSD flashbacks from much worse social ostracism in my childhood. I chose to heal and live to fight another day. But I did take a lot of lessons with me from that experience.

One of them was that even in the best circles, there are people who snap or peck at other people for reasons that A. don’t really matter and B. are beyond the personal control of the person being attacked. It’s the root of racism, ableism and pretty much all other evil as far as I’ve ever seen.

It isn’t the differences that hurt us. It’s the intolerance of difference.

Even in current American politics, it isn’t the fact that people disagree about the best ways to counter a pandemic. It’s the hatred of those who have different opinions that is breaking families, friendships and efforts to protect the vulnerable.

Willful endangerment by hugging people in large gatherings and refusing to wear a mask in crowded places isn’t about an opinion. It’s about denigrating and antagonizing those who have different circumstances and greater concern. On the other side of the political divide, shunning and shaming anyone who asks questions or mentions new information is another manifestation of the “us versus them” paradigm..

I don’t always enter the fray on social media. After I was hounded out of the local Extinction Rebellion group, I took a nine-month break from social media and had a lot fewer arguments in general. But I also became a lot more isolated. So, I’m back now and I pick my battles, but I do choose to occasionally stand up to those pouring shame on someone while they’re down.

The recent spat over typos and spelling errors on Blind Penpals was one such instance. There were several male members with English-sounding names who repeatedly posted about the high level of English grammar and spelling in mistakes in the group. They were from what I could access on their profiles all coming from fairly privileged situations. I don’t know whether they were actually blind and visually impaired as well, but they were westerners, native English speakers, and mostly men. Their style of posting showed that they had a lot of time to devote to social media and they didn’t have a lot of survival-level pressures in their lives.

I posted a brief reply on the first post informing the person offended by the errors that many in the group are non-native English speakers, and because it is a group of blind people, many also use imperfect voice recognition technology. I fully expected that to be the end of the discussion. Instead several others piled on and there were more posts harassing and shaming members whose posts were not perfect.

What I came to in the end of that discussion is worth repeating:

“The issue is not that person A has an opinion and person B has an opinion and they are different. The issue is that person A has an opinion denigrating person B and feels empowered to share it widely and publicly and person B wants to be left alone and not harassed. It is time the world woke up to this thing.

I don’t care if your opinion is different from mine as long as your opinion has no bearing on anyone but yourself. If you are troubled by someone’s imperfect typing or dictating, someone’s skin color, someone’s accent, someone’s religion, someone’s sexual orientation, someone’s gender identity or lack there of, someone’s disability or body shape, go cry into a pillow.

Expressing a negative opinion about other people is pretty much the root of all the evil in the world. There are acts of nature that hurt us, but they aren’t evil. Even Covid is just a life form, living and procreating. Evil comes in when a thinking entity denigrates another, not in defense, but just because the other makes them feel uncomfortable or requires them to exercise patience, tolerance or self-discipline.

The old saying is true after all. There are only two kinds of people in the world. There is one important divide and that is between people who attack others simply for being different, uncomfortable or inconvenient or allow others to do so without challenge and people who defend against such attacks and insist on inclusion. It’s the only divide that actually matters.”

I know typos actually do sometimes cause confusion or real problems. I also know some people really want to learn to use language better. I have spent the past fifteen years teaching writing craft and English as a second language. I spend all day essentially criticizing other people’s grammar or writing and helping them make it better.

But they asked me to do it and I never shame them. I have students who make the same mistake literally hundreds of times. But they are all doing the best they can. Bad grammar or bad spelling is never simply a matter of laziness. It is often a matter of being too stressed, rushing to much, difficulty focusing and all kinds of other things.

The problems that matter are the problems caused denigrating a person or a group of people. In this world, just about everything boils down to that.

The catch is that we aren't all permanently on one side or the other of that divide. I am dismayed when people I respect fall into the trap of shaming others or judging others without having all the information. It is crucial to keep this divide in mind. It doesn’t mean never criticizing. But it does mean paying attention to whether or not the person criticized had a real choice in their situation. And it means regularly checking your own confirmation bias.

Do people who are bullied really turn into bullies?

There is a vicious, traumatizing and stigmatizing rumor going around about my son and kids like him on social media and even in the mainstream media.

I have run across the remarks and assumptions at least ten times in just the past two days, and I wasn’t looking for them or even aware that such a stereotype existed until very recently. This vicious, hateful and potentially deadly myth has it that people who were bullied as kids become bullies, anti-social adults and/or violent criminals.

A few real-life examples do exist and psychologists call them “bully-victims,” but they are far less common than the popular stereotype assumes.

Creative Commons image by Carolyn Langton

I have recently rejoined the world of social media after a nine-month hiatus prompted partly by a serious incident of online bullying (yes, it happens with adults too) and partly by the exhaustion of homeschooling kids with special needs during successive Covid lockdowns.

And this is what I found on my return. This vicious rumor against people like my son and like me, a stereotype painting people who were bullied as potentially violent and liable to lack empathy. It’s a myth often spread even by those who previously claimed to be allies.

Maybe the myth started with an incident or incidents of violence in which the gun lobby decided to make excuses about how the shooter was once called “wimpy face” as a child and thus the quick and easy availability of semi-automatic weapons had nothing to do with it. Or maybe it was just a way of blowing off steam about empathy-impaired people during the U.S. election. Either way, it is now a pervasive stereotype.

The comments are things like an acquaintance on Facebook posting under a story about a violent police officer, “No excuse for it! He was probably bullied as a kid and this is how he takes it out on others.” Someone else referring to white supremacists as “a$$holes who were bullied in high school." And a passing reference on the television news about the need for bullying intervention to prevent “victims” from becoming mass shooters.

The overall assumption is that a direct link exists between being a target of bullying and future perpetration of violence or cruelty. And that assumption is everywhere these days to the extent that admitting you were bullied as a kid is now more likely to result in distrustful glances than support and empathy.

My first reaction was hurt and irritation, when I heard about this myth. I was a target of bullying and social ostracism as a kid because of my vision impairment, my strange-looking eyes, my secondhand clothes and my family’s alternative spirituality and lifestyle. I had a lot of strikes against me. My son just has being a member of a locally high-profile racial minority, the only non-passing representative of such in his school. But that is plenty to get a kid knocked down and chanted at by groups of bullies.

I have overcome a lot of my past, but it is still hard to see my son going through it for something equally beyond his control. And now he’s saddled with yet one more stigma. Not only is he “a young brown male” and an ESL learner, he is now categorized as a potential perpetrator of violence and cruelty in the popular imagination because of something that was done TO him.

He’s ten and he’s at the tender and naturally open age where he reminds me to include our two cats when I tell someone how many “people” are in our family. Empathy isn’t something he’s lacking.

So, the comments hurt. But then my rational brain kicks in. OK, but maybe there is some significant statistical correlation between being a target and becoming a perpetrator. I sure have had enough rage at times to be able to relate. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge people who spread this stereotype. So, I go look up the stats.

The National Bullying Prevention Center has a page on bullying statistics. While the site says as many as one in every five kids is “bullied” at some point, there are a lot of things that they call bullying. Name calling and exclusion are considered bullying along side physical attacks. Those who experience pervasive and repeated bullying are a bit more rare, but still more common than most people like to think. Kids with disabilities and those who are identifiable as belonging to a minority race or religion at a given school experience much higher rates of bullying.

There is also a section on the effects of bullying. Unsurprisingly, kids who are bullied end up with increased risk of “depression, anxiety, sleep difficulties, lower academic achievement, and dropping out of school.” Kids who are both bullied and bully others are mentioned but only to note that they have increased risk of emotional and behavioral problems. So do kids who blame themselves for being bullied.

Another researcher, Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa who focuses on “the bullying cycle,” claims that less than 10 percent of bullies can actually be considered bully-victims. Although she contributes to the stereotype somewhat by completely ignoring other bullying targets in her “cycle” theory, Vaillancourt, offers no guess, educated or otherwise, about what percent of targets actually turn into “bully-victims.”

The statistics don’t mention anything about being bullied making one more likely to bully others or more likely to become violent or anti-social in adulthood. In fact, despite a lengthy search, I could not find any study that hinted at this. Given the pervasive stereotype, the lack of any hard evidence makes me think the opposite is more likely true.

I do know from my own experience that being bullied has made me less likely to be a nice, quiet bystander who enables bullies. Hell hath no fury like getting a little light-hearted bullying in and then being hit crossways by a hurricane that was once an ostracized child.

But turn me to bully those even more vulnerable than myself? Not likely.

There was only one moment in my life where perhaps I stood on that precipice. I was huddled in an out of the way corner on a stairway during lunch in seventh grade when someone landed on top of me. I was bruised and my precious colored pencils were broken. I leapt up and grabbed the body of the intruder and started wailing away at his back with my fists. It turned out to be another bullied kid who had been thrown bodily down the stairway onto me.

I wish I could say that the two of us became friends and held out against the bullies together. I did let go of him and stop pounding on him when I heard the bullies laughing and I got a bit of a look at him. But he ran away and never went inside my short visual range again. It’s a story too often played out. Those who suffer from oppression and bullying are driven against one another to ensure that they remain powerless against their assailants.

But even in those worst years of terror and rage, I was never tempted to actually pick on someone else. There is an ingredient missing that I would have needed to make that even slightly appealing. One would have to feel that bringing someone else down or pushing them even further down would somehow raise you up. I know the theory, but none of the emotion behind it resonates. I never felt even a little tempted.

My son was in a tussle in preschool in which a friend grabbed a toy from him and he pushed the other boy. The boy lost his balance and fell over a bench and onto a pile of legos, which scraped his back. Because my son was the only child of color in the preschool and a member of a very controversial group in our area, some of the teachers and parents immediately labeled my son as a dangerous. There was even a petition to have him expelled, which failed without our intervention because there were also honest teachers who reported that my son was no more disruptive or violent than any of the other boys.

Since then, he has been the target of bullying by older boys in school, but otherwise he hasn’t been involved with fighting at school. I believe that after his experiences, he wouldn’t participate in bullying or harassing another kid.

I can’t be so sure that he would have the confidence to stand up to bullies on his own behalf or on behalf of another. Unlike me, my son has the temperament to be a follower or a bystander, but he also is the kind of kid to quickly empathize with another human or creature.

He is now in the period of childhood in which superheroes play a large role. He loves to fantasize about being a hero and stopping the bad guys. In our discussions and in our choices of bedtime reading, the topic is often real historical heroes who fought to protect the vulnerable.

I am not worried that my son may become a bully because he has been bullied. I do worry that he may follow others into unhealthy habits, including exclusion of others, because of his temperament and eager desire to make peace and be part of the group. But this is something that has been part of his nature since long before racist adults went after him in preschool.

Whether it is my tendency toward quick anger or his bent to go along with the crowd, neither of these are a result of. our experiences as targets of bullying, but rather natural characteristics which come from temperament. In the end, it is empathy that prevents people from becoming a bully and lack of empathy that may cause someone to become a bully.

There are actually life experiences which can impair a person’s empathy. Extreme rejection of a child by family, complete isolation from human contact and being raised in an institutional environment have all been linked to dysfunctions of empathy.

Even though I know some experiences can lead to disruption of empathy, I would not willingly participate in labeling those who have suffered such terrible abuse. Where there is real concern the focus must be on healing. The one thing science knows about redressing an actual dysfunction in empathy is that the only treatment is lots more empathy.

But there isn’t even a real concern when it comes to a link between targets of bullying and the perpetration of violence and bullying. There is no such link. Perpetuating such a stereotype is nothing more than piling on with the bullies to rain more blows down on vulnerable kids and the survivors they become.

Please stop it. Don’t make statements based on such an assumption. Don’t joke about it. Don’t speculate based on this stereotype. It does real harm.

Post election blues over seeing red

Please forgive my mixing of puns. It isn’t that I don’t take this seriously. My nerves are as frayed as those of many of my readers. But coming up with a title that wouldn’t drive my readers away screaming wasn’t easy.

A title is supposed to tell you why you should read a particular post, but it is often hard to put into a catchy phrase. Why look back at this messy and painful election? Why dwell on a future that is still uncertain? Trump lost. Sometimes that feels like the only thing that matters.

But this really was a vote about the soul of the nation. And we’ve got to look at that soul, once it’s bared. Otherwise, we’ll end up having to go through the same painful things again and again and again. That’s why I didn’t give in to the strong temptation to write about herbs instead. So, bear with me if you are in need of some steadying or even if you just want a space to bounce your thoughts off of.

We finally got a moment of celebration, but it is likely to be very brief. I hear and read people all across America and in other countries marveling that so many American voters were still willing to vote for that uncouth, hateful and psychologically unhealthy man. We were all well aware that he still had supporters, but it seemed like many people had dropped their support for him.

It doesn’t surprise me that fundamentalist Christians didn’t change their tune, regardless of their posturing about “character” and “values” when it comes to other politicians. It doesn’t even surprise me that some Hispanic voters went for Trump. It is time America realized that this is a very diverse group of citizens with widely differing interests. And the Democrats did take them for granted and ignore them after all.

But what both surprises and dismays me is the gains Trump made among white women. I stand stunned. What could possibly possess more than half of white female voters to support a man who has made his opinion that women are objects and only valuable if they please men very clear? How could MORE of these women support him this time after having to endure his sewage-mouth for so long?

It’s been through a battle and the war ain’t over. Creative Commons image by John M. Cropper

This is part of the sickness we have found in the nation’s soul. One of the ways I try to comprehend this soul is by reading Christian bloggers to get a perspective that is definitely outside my bubble. One of those I read on occasion is Kieth Giles, who grew up in a right-wing, white Christian environment in Texas. He’s made the mental trip across the big divide in America and while I still may not agree with him on lots of things, his perspective on what makes Republican voters tick is invaluable.

“Republican Christians tend to care about the unborn, the traditional family, and the right to bear arms,” he wrote in a recent post. “Therefore, they vote for Republican candidates who at least ‘say’ they care about overturning abortion laws, defending traditional definitions of marriage [anti-gay marriage, etc.], and protecting the Second Amendment.”

Add to this that many right-wing, white Christians have been surrounded by a highly charged bubble of constant media messaging on these three topics and what you have is a deeply passionate response. They don’t just care about abortion. They are torn apart by the thought of innocent babies being killed. They don’t just dislike the idea of gay sex, they fervently believe that traditional families are the last defenders of all that is good in this messed up world. And feeling under threat, they truly fear gun snatchers.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard any of this, but it is maybe the first time I’ve sat down and taken a good hard look at the emotions behind it. I always kind of figured that anti-abortion activists didn’t really care about the babies. They just cared about controlling what they see as “loose women.” They cared about punishing those they saw as breaking religious purity laws. That was what I believed.

But what this election and its fallout are telling us is that the leaders may have started the movement that way. The pundits who push the propaganda may be coming from that cynical perspective, but many white women are buying the message about protecting babies on a deep and emotional level.

The same goes for the issue of the “traditional family.” Now, I really don’t doubt that there is an element of hate mongering going on here. A lot of people have gotten caught up in the us-and-them game. People who abide by gender norms are on one side and those who don’t are on the other. Just like with sports teams, a lot of people can get whipped up into a frenzy of antagonism over something that doesn’t need to take over a person’s identity. But what I am seeing now is that there is also a deeper emotional element.

We can all relate to the root emotion—the overwhelming anxiety over the troubles in our world. Whether you are focused on climate change, pervasive racism, vast inequity and the finite nature of the earth’s resources or the loss of authentic opportunities, disconnection from spirit, fractious tribalism, endless consumerism or the addictive pitfalls of substances and entertainment, the world really looks like it’s going to hell in a hand basket a good share of the time. Our biggest differences aren’t usually in what we think the problems are but in what we think the solutions are.

Many women have subscribed to the idea that family is the one good thing in all that mess. Despite any unpleasantness, micro-aggressions, suppression of spirit or acrimony in family life, it is still the one thing we can really hang on to. My mother and I recently came to the same conclusion in one of our long, meandering discussions on life, politics and the meaning of the universe. So, we aren’t really that far away from these women either.

But the Trump supporting women have absorbed a worldview that narrows family to a very traditional model. And given the threatening pressures from outside and that sense that family is our only real haven, their attachment to that traditional view of family is authentically passionate.

How exactly that leads them to enthusiastically support Trump, rather than supporting him with the kind of resigned frustration that so many progressives feel for the Democrats, I can’t say. That is a mystery the Christian bloggers have yet to reveal.

I have tried my damnedest to be understanding in all this. I’m not writing people off as hateful and authoritarian just because their primary issues have to do with things that seem at first glance to be mainly about limiting someone else’s autonomy, whether that’s the ability of women to make crucial life choices or the rights of everyone to form loving relationships in the way that is most natural for them. I’m making the effort to see the heart behind these stances.

And I still find the soul of the nation in peril.

I will allow that a moral, thinking person can feel strongly about protecting babies or saving the traditional family. But in either case, Donald Trump doesn’t look like a choice to promote those causes. His actions are about as much for the traditional family as a gay stripper might be. And he clearly is happy to endanger the lives of immigrant babies.

Guns? Well, I guess it is legit to say he isn’t out to snatch the guns of rural and suburban white folks. But I have a hard time seeing defending one’s guns as an issue with heart.

Now pundits ask us to “come together” and heal the divide in our country. That would be a lot easier if the other side had concerns that were not focused on controlling or harming other people. The common ground isn’t there, because that is a deal breaker for most of us.

There is one thing I think we can find comfort in, despite the lack of a clear “blue wave” in the election. There was a sand bar in the way.

What this election showed about America, yet again, was that the majority has always been far more progressive than the politicians. And the political status quo is maintained by several anti-democratic mechanisms. One is the winner-take-all voting system where everyone has to vote for one of two major candidates or have their vote effectively turned against their interests. Another is the Senate system that gives preference to states with low population and thus primarily to rural, conservative states.

And most egregiously there is the Electoral College which was specifically designed to protect the institution of slavery and prejudice elections in favor of rural, conservative voters at the expense of urban, progressive voters.

Among my English-as-a-second-language students are adult professionals from the Czech Republic who mostly came of age around the time of the Velvet Revolution, when young activists overthrew the totalitarian Communist regime. They believed that America was the guiding light of democracy and now they come to me confused. Their Czech-language media has started to describe the US Electoral College for the first time and they are alarmed.

“How did the American election system get broken?” they ask.

“It didn’t,” I explain. “It’s working exactly the way it was meant to.”

I give them a history lesson—with grammar and pronunciation points in English to make sure class time is used well. The Electoral College is working just as it did two hundred years ago to extend the lifetime of the American slavery system far past the time when slavery was abandoned by Canada, Britain and Western Europe. It achieved this by weighting votes to give greater voice to rural conservatives. And it is still doing that today.

The fact is that a lot of people still voted for Trump, but more than four million more voted for Biden, a lack-luster candidate if there ever was one. In any country with a modern democracy it would not have been considered a close race. It might not have been a blue wave, but that also might be because of the artificial sandbars set up to make sure we never see a blue wave and the widespread voter suppression that acted as a flood break.

On Tuesday, November 10, I finally received my mail-in ballot for the 2020 election. I usually receive my ballot a month earlier than that and receive it automatically. This time new voter suppression rules by the Trump administration meant that I had to specifically request my ballot in the summer. Then, the Trump administration sabotaged the US Post Office so that even though my county elections office mailed the ballot two months ago, it still arrived a week after it had to be physically back in Oregon five thousand miles away.

This is voter suppression at work. It isn’t generally considered “election fraud” but it is fraud’s sneakier cousin.

I was lucky. I got caught up in only the fringes of voter suppression efforts and my county office was ready and eager to help. They had a backup system to allow me to vote via email and even though it took specific attention to a single voter, they made it possible for me to cast my vote legally and securely. But the point is that I was certainly not the only one hit by voter suppression measures and in many cases that cost Biden and Congressional Democrats votes, because these measures were made to impact groups that were expected to vote against Trump.

People in other western democracies look at the images of Americans waiting in line for hours with masks and umbrellas to vote in the United States and they shake their heads in bewildered sympathy. That is the kind of treatment voters get in Belarus. That is how regimes behave when they know the voters are not their friends.

So, despite the fact that I am disappointed and even ashamed that 55 percent of white women voted for Trump… again, I know that the soul of the nation is still there. It is tattered and torn from way too many battles, but despite a rigged, weighted voting system and voter suppression directed at voters expected to be less than enthusiastic for Trump, such as people who use mail-in ballots, we’re still here.