Category Archives: Quandaries and Rants

Choosing Life

Posted on November 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s rare that I dedicate more than one blog post to a particular topic. Usually, I’ve said all I need to say in a single entry. This year I’ve made exceptions for the ongoing abortion debate, adding this entry to two earlier ones: The Politics of Human Reproduction (March 8, 2021) and Review: The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler (October 26, 2021).  

According to a Wikipedia article on abortions in the United States (which included 207 citations when I accessed it on November 8, 2021), American abortion laws were codified and made stricter over the course of the 19th century. This changed and laws began to be liberalized starting in the late 1960’s. In 1967, the state of Colorado legalized abortions in cases of rape, incest, or maternal disability. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling legalizing abortions throughout the U.S. for early term abortions in 1973 (Roe vs. Wade), abortions were already legal under some circumstances in 30 of the 50 U.S. states. However, when the plaintiff called “Roe” had begun her suit in Texas in 1969 demanding the right to an abortion, state law there prohibited abortions except to save the life of the mother.

Prior to the Roe decision, some states with less restrictive laws became “abortion magnets” for women in adjoining areas who needed or wanted the procedure. Abortions were more readily available to women with the financial means to pay and to travel if necessary. In one high-profile case in 1962, a married pregnant woman from Arizona went to Sweden for an abortion after she learned that thalidomide, an ingredient in a medicine she’d taken early in her pregnancy, could cause severe birth defects. It turned out that the fetus she’d carried was badly deformed. Had it not been aborted, it would likely have died at birth. 

Among the statistical charts in the Wikipedia article is one plotting annual rates of abortion in the U.S. from 1973 through 2017. It shows a dramatic increase during the 1970’s, and since then a generally downward trend. By 2017, the rate among women of childbearing age (considered as 15-44) had dropped from a peak of about 30 per 1000 women to only about 13. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#Number_of_abortions). The vast majority of abortions were being performed during the first 13 weeks of pregnancy.  

By the time of Roe, I’d been married for four years and was successfully using birth control. I have never had to choose whether or not to have an abrupt marriage to “legitimize” a child, whether or not to give an infant up for adoption, whether or not to end a pregnancy to conserve my own health or to forestall the birth of a badly deformed child. Other women have had more difficult choices. Starting in junior high school, I heard rumors of girls who’d “gotten in trouble.” Several very early marriages had taken place by the time I was in ninth grade. The phenomenon of “seven month babies” for new brides was quite common. Through high school and then college, more of my female classmates dropped out or disappeared for several months. Some later resurfaced, still single. A few had an infant; others told plausible stories of family distress or financial hardship that had taken them away.

It turned out just as I left home that I’d lived for most of my teens within half a mile of an illegal Maryland abortion clinic. Our neighborhood’s sylvan setting included many homes built far back from the street. Some were completely out of sight. In 1960, as seventh graders, my friend Ann and I had paired up to visit every house along our one-mile road to help boost our Girl Scout cookie sales. At one secluded house, we almost left because it took a long time before anyone answered the doorbell. Just as we turned to go, a well-groomed middle-aged man opened the door. We didn’t see inside and weren’t asked to come in. He bought four boxes of cookies, though. We were pleased with ourselves. Although we’d never match our troop’s star performer (whose mom worked at a major military base nearby), our efforts had moved us up in the cookie sales standings.

During the summer of 1965, Ann got a temporary job as clerical assistant to our county’s prosecutor. One day she noticed that the criminal case she was typing up included a familiar address—the secluded house up the road where we’d sold the cookies. People at that address weren’t cited for any maternal injuries or deaths, just for performing then-illegal abortions. I never learned, from Ann or anyone else, the disposition of the case, or if the clinic staff were fined or jailed. I recently garnered a few additional details from a former neighbor who’d lived across the road from the clinic as a child. While it was operating, her family had regularly noticed cars with out-of-state license plates going in and out of the driveway. Now I wonder how the clinic operated in those pre-Roe, pre-internet days. How did they get referrals? How did they schedule? What health and safety measures did they use? Were staff members medically qualified? Did they have protocols in place for unexpected doorbell rings? 

Norma McCorvey, whose pseudonym was “Jane Roe” in the 1973 Supreme Court case, may have reflected the ambiguity many of us feel about the abortion issue. By the time her case was decided, the pregnancy she’d wanted to end had long since gone to term. She’d put the resulting infant up for adoption. Once her identity became known, McCorvey was enlisted as a pawn by first one, then the opposing set of pressure groups in the ongoing abortion debate. She died in 2017 in Texas, her legacy as muddled as the current state of our understanding. A documentary filmed during the final year of her life indicates she was used by partisans on both sides. However, she also profited from the inflammatory issue to gain funds and notoriety (https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/may/22/aka-jane-roe-documentary-norma-mccorvey).  

The pressures on our court system to rule definitively on abortion are immense. The likelihood of good outcomes is miniscule. Some of our prior national experiments with prohibition may serve as a cautionary tale. Even as abortion rates continue their general decline, rhetoric about the issue continues to escalate. The documentary about McCorvey tries to plumb her successive stints in the “pro-choice” or “pro-life” camp, but it is hardly that simple. As one advocate who’d worked with McCorvey for over a decade put it: “The thing is, we want our stories to be tidy. And humans aren’t tidy.” 

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Stuck Between Levels

Posted on November 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

The only time I’ve been stuck in an elevator, it was more an inconvenience than a catastrophe. A long time ago, in order to finalize a preliminary job offer, I needed to complete some personnel paperwork and then do interviews with two potential supervisors. The personnel office and these supervisors were in the same three-story building—personnel on the first floor, supervisors on the second.  As I completed the needed personnel forms, I noticed that it was almost time for my interviews. Rather than try to find the stairs, I took the elevator I’d passed in the main lobby on my way in. I was the only passenger. 

The elevator got halfway to the second floor and then stopped. I could see the upper floor through a ceiling gap above my head, but had no way to get out of the elevator to reach it. I pushed various control panel buttons to get the elevator unstuck, but nothing worked. I tried not to panic—even if the elevator crashed to the basement, I’d probably survive with only minor injuries. If I didn’t get the job, I could keep on looking—I was well qualified and had gotten a good score on the relevant civil service exam. Something else was bound to open up if this position didn’t pan out. 

After a couple more iterations of futile button pushing, I finally hit the “send help” switch. In a few minutes, a repair technician appeared and solved the problem. Though I was a little late for the first interview, the supervisor was aware of the crankiness of the elevator, having recently gotten stuck himself.  He made light of the incident. I got the job. Exiting the second interview, I found the stairway for subsequent trips. 

Lately it can seem hard to work our way out of the various global difficulties we humans have gotten ourselves into—a viral pandemic, nuclear and conventional arms races, air and water pollution, food insecurity, mass migrations, erratic weather, warming oceans, deforestation, income and wealth inequality. Our problems are sometimes exacerbated by distorted and distorting social media. We can often seem stuck. 

I’ve been exposed to many models that use the notion of levels to describe natural and/or human phenomena. One basic model,  the theory of evolution, describes how simple one-celled creatures have, over long timespans, spawned more and more complex life. On a human scale, models include Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. At the organizational level, a Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) provides practices for organizational development and process improvement. These models make implicit assumptions that a shift to the “next level” is worthwhile and likely to persist. Left implicit, too, are the chaos and discomfort that can accompany a shift of levels, especially for us humans when the systems are human-based. 

On any given day, I may run up against recent level turmoil in burgeoning communications technologies—land-line phone, mobile phone, text messaging, internet messaging, social media—which mode suits for a particular task or contact? How do I reach others whose communication modes are more limited than mine—maybe by using postal mail or through an in-person meeting? Our financial systems are awash in online trades, cryptocurrencies, international clearinghouses, widespread if illegal money laundering schemes. Trying to get a broader view, I can find it amazing that our highly diverse global society functions at all. Controversies break out ranging from local school boards to the World Health Organization. 

When I was in school, teachers sometimes reminded me of a quote by scientist Albert Einstein: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Many of the difficulties we find ourselves in are, I believe, symptoms of ongoing level shifts. We’re undergoing both a shift in our kind of thinking and a shift in social systems we’ve created that no longer work very well, if they ever did. 

Perhaps the best we can do is avoid panic, diminish our need to be totally in control, learn when to hit the “send help” switch, and function as better repair technicians for the pieces of systems we know most thoroughly. 

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Review: The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler

Posted on October 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

Few books have hit me with the emotional wallop of Ann Fessler’s 2006 study, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. I’d recently done an online search for books, either fiction or non-fiction, about the ongoing abortion debate in the United States. Publicity is mounting about increasingly restrictive abortion laws in some states. One or more related cases will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court this term. I wanted to re-inform myself about women’s options before the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. 

Ann Fessler is a visual artist and author born in 1949. She has always known she was adopted. Her adoptive parents loved her and nurtured her to adulthood. However, well into her adulthood, she’d thought little about the perspective of the woman who’d relinquished her for adoption shortly after Ann was born. Then, in 1989, Ann attended an art event where she was approached by a woman who thought Ann might be the biological daughter she’d given up 40 years earlier. Ann began to consider the possible emotional and physical consequences to the original mother of giving up a child. Her subsequent work has chronicled the stories of these child-surrendering mothers. As she continued her research, Ann also began taking tentative steps toward finding her own biological mother.

 

As a girl child born in 1947, I’ve lived through the period of Ann’s research. Growing up in a small Maryland town, I was always somewhat aware of social pressures to conform—“What will the neighbors think?”—but I didn’t understand the full brunt of the ruptures such pressures could cause until I was in my late teens and had started seriously dating. Reading Ann Fessler’s book resurrected insecurities I’d almost forgotten I had.

In the young women’s sexual lottery, I was lucky: my mother practiced birth control and explained the rudiments of sex to me before I became sexually active. Once I did decide to have sex, my boyfriend and I were less careful than we should have been, but no pregnancy resulted. However, there were millions of girls, many from families like mine aspiring to become middle-class, who were not so fortunate. They did become pregnant. Very few had a legal option to terminate their pregnancies. Most had limited financial and emotional resources and were under tremendous societal pressure to conform to the stereotype of the “good girl,” one who presumably did not have sex.

Before Roe, a major option for a pregnant young woman was a rushed marriage, typically to the baby’s father and typically before the bride began to show external signs of the impending birth. Anecdotal evidence from classmates and friends of my generation suggests there were many such marriages, though definitive statistics seem hard to come by. Another possibility was to attempt to self-abort, or to obtain an illegal abortion. Either could have serious legal and health repercussions. Estimates of the number of “stealth abortions” in the U.S. before Roe vary widely, but such abortions did occur, along with related maternal injuries and deaths.  

 

Ann begins her narrative with an estimate of the number of young women who surrendered infants for adoption during the pre-Roe period 1945-1973 (pegged at roughly 1.5 million). She then personalizes the statistics through individual oral histories of the experiences and trajectories of over a hundred of these mothers who were willing to be interviewed about their lives—before, during, and after their adoptive pregnancy. 

Ann tells us: “In June of 2002, I began tape-recording the oral histories of women who surrendered a newborn for adoption between 1945…and 1973. … These years were a time of enormous change for young women. … And though premarital sex was certainly not a new phenomenon, it became increasingly common… For women born after 1949, the odds were that they would have sex before they reached age twenty.

… Fearing that sex education would promote or encourage sexual relations, parents and schools thought it best to leave young people uninformed. During this time, effective birth control was difficult to obtain. … The efforts to restrict information and access to birth control did not prevent teens from having sex, however. The result was an explosion in premarital pregnancy and in the numbers of babies surrendered for adoption.”  

 

The era of the 1950’s and 60’s had a severe double standard about the consequences of sexual activity for young men and young women, some of which persists. As Ann remarks: 

“Hearing these women tell their stories today, one can’t help but acknowledge the unfairness of calling them ‘bad girls’ and of the social scorn that was inflicted almost exclusively on them, and not on the young men with whom they had conceived.” 

 

Through her interviewees, Ann paints a vivid picture of the emotional shaming of young women who “got in trouble”: 

“This was in that period of time when there wasn’t much worse that a girl could do. They almost treated you like you had committed murder or something. —Toni” 

Most girls who acceded to societal pressure were sent to homes for unwed mothers to wait out the remaining months of their pregnancies, give birth, and almost immediately decide on the future of their newborn child. Conditions in homes for unwed mothers varied, but most in postwar America exerted strong pressure to relinquish the infant. Ann found that: 

“The degree of pressure put on the women to surrender sometimes crossed the line from persuasion to outright coercion. Many of the women I interviewed recalled high-pressure campaigns waged by the maternity-home staff.”  

“Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to keep the baby, or explained the options. I went to the maternity home, I was going to have a baby, they were going to take it, and I was going to go home. I was not allowed to keep the baby. I would have been disowned. …Joyce I”

Few women were given any counseling about the sense of bereavement they’d feel on surrendering their infants. For many, this has left lifetime scars: 

“Giving up my son was a seminal moment in my life. People will say, ‘Get over it.’ I can’t tell you how many people say, ‘Aren’t you ever going to get over it?’ Never. You never get over this. Men often go to the military and fight in wars and they never really get over what they see. This is like one of those huge tragedies in your life. That’s how I look at it, as a tragedy. It’s a tragedy because it didn’t have to happen.    —Maggie” 

“I couldn’t (move on) and I can’t. It’s a big issue to those who lived it. There are women out there who lost their firstborn child and never got to grieve. I can’t even put it into words.  —Suzanne”

 

No single solution can heal the scars that remain. Partial palliatives exist: 

—The stigma of unwed motherhood has diminished as societal norms have evolved, so more mothers are keeping their babies.
—Some women’s access to well-paid work has increased to the point that they are able as single mothers to provide for a child.
—Registries for adoptees and their birth parents have expanded.
—Some restrictions to accessing original birth certificates have been loosened.
—More women who relinquished infants for adoption have been able to reestablish contact with their now-adult children, many with families of their own. Most, but not all, reunions have been healing. 

Despite some progress, we as a society have much remaining work to do, both to help heal past wounds and to reduce the extent and severity of the new wounds we create. Further restricting abortions will not make abortion go away. It may further fracture an already fractious society around this difficult issue. 

Perhaps we could work more consistently and conscientiously to create social structures to reduce the likelihood of unintended pregnancies:

—provide better sex education 
—provide more widely, more equitably available contraception
—withhold judgment of those whose prior sexual conduct we may disagree with
—learn to listen better
—instill in young women, and young men, a sense of self-worth
—instill in young women, and young men, a sense of responsibility for their sexual conduct

Then, we could support whatever decisions a mother-to-be is able to make, with as little coercion as possible. If the mother (and maybe the father) decide to keep the child, we could provide extra mentoring and support for the young parent(s). 

 

Abortion law in and of itself will remain a very small part of the work that needs to be done. I’m most grateful for Ann Fessler’s pioneering work at helping us see a bigger picture. 

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The Weather of Mysteries, the Mysteries of Weather

Posted on October 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

I grew up on mysteries, both televised and in book form. Though I mostly ignored the Nancy Drew series (part of every preteen girl’s book shelf?), by the time I finished high school, I’d been steeped in Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner. I had vague images of the little English village where Miss Jane Marple solved murders. The Orient Express and a tour boat on the Nile seemed exotic and thrilling places for sleuth Hercule Poirot to twirl his mustache and exercise his little gray cells. Though I didn’t expect Perry Mason ever to lose a case, I enjoyed weekly TV evenings watching Mason and prosecutor Hamilton Burger match wits in courtroom dramas.  

Once I left my family home and moved around the country and overseas, my personal library went through several changes.  Lately, it’s been downsized, but I’m still within range of a public or university library. I’ve consistently gravitated toward the mystery section. Over time, my tastes have evolved. I’ve concentrated more often on women novelists who feature women protagonists and who define their settings in meticulous detail, often including the weather. 

At the suggestion of a friend, I began reading the Susan Wittig Albert series about the fictional Texas hill town of Pecan Springs. Her “cozy mystery” part-time detective and full-time herb and plant store owner/operator China Bayles tapped into a love of landscape that had been dormant in me for a while.   

Not long after I moved to North Carolina in 2007, I came across a holiday story by local author Margaret Maron. Before long, I’d read everything I could find by this self-taught writer, whose fictional East Carolina milieu of Colleton County, presided over by bootlegger’s daughter Judge Deborah Knott, sometimes seemed intriguingly, uncomfortably real. I especially remember Storm Track, a 2000 murder mystery with an Atlantic hurricane built into the plot. 

Now I’m a recent transplant to southern California, trying to find my way in this semi-desert climate partially filled with retirees like me. No hurricanes here. Muted seasonal changes so far. (Luckily) no significant earthquakes since our move. The other bane of this area is wildfires. Locals with longer pedigrees than mine have told me scary stories of past area fires and evacuations. This year’s outbreaks have already set records for size and ferocity.  Therefore, I was only a little surprised when a summer library visit produced a wildfire mystery, Martha C. Lawrence’s Ashes of Aries. The plot was a tad out of my usual range, but the description of a Rancho Santa Fe neighborhood in flames was almost too vivid. 

Lately lots of pundits have spent lots of print and air time expounding on a changing climate that is likely to include an increase in drastic weather events, some unpredicted.  I’ve found a blog post, but not yet an Albert novel about the great freeze-up of February, 2021, when much of Texas discovered the limited reliability of its electric grid under winter stress. I’m sure there are other novels with wildfires, others with hurricanes. Our reality may be approaching or exceeding the weather limits of popular mystery fiction. 

It seems as if the strides made in the past century or so toward being able to predict weather more consistently and reliably are getting undercut. Hurricane predictors talk about “rapid intensification.” States and regions in the U.S. West declare drought emergencies. They try to evolve contingency water resource plans on the fly. Wells run dry. Power grids fail or are shut down to reduce the chance of spark-ignited wildfires.  

It makes sense for those of us who can to get more serious about resource conservation. Per author Jonathan Safran Foer, in his recent non-fiction book We are the Weather, our personal choices do have an impact: we need to eat less meat, do less driving, travel less by air, have fewer children. For me, the child part is over and done, but I’m working on the remaining three issues. 

Once, in the few months I’ve lived in San Diego, I experienced an unexpected dividend of our less predictable weather: a brief but intense rainbow.   

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Our (Flawed) Experiments with Truth

Posted on September 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

Recently, rereading some personal journals I wrote nearly forty years ago, I came across a reference to the English-language version of a famous autobiography I was then reading, Mohandas Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth. I’ve since lost my copy, and didn’t journal much of the content. Skimming a current online summary, I learned that Gandhi first published the work in his native language, Gujarati, in weekly installments in his newsletter in India during the latter 1920’s. Then, he was actively engaged in the struggle for Indian independence from Great Britain. In his work, he described the first forty some years of his life, with emphasis on the evolution of his concept of satyagraha, often rendered in English as “non-violent passive resistance.” The book has been translated into 15 regional Indian languages and at least a dozen European ones.

The title of the work has stuck with me. While Gandhi’s definition of “truth” has a strong spiritual component, somewhat different from many Western perspectives, the gist of his argument seems to me to be that one may approach “truth” but cannot codify it or force it into any set system. To a Westerner, his search sounds something like our use (and misuse) of the method of scientific inquiry. My understanding of scientific method is that we can only approximate “whole truth,” never totally pin it down. Nevertheless, we conduct successive experiments to align our understanding more closely with expanding portions of truth. Sometimes old explanations are disproved. No theory or explanation is ever final, but only as good as its ability to describe and predict actual phenomena. 

The current rancor about multiple cultural and political issues seems to me to be partly due to a misguided attempt to force “truth”  to remain static. We watch coverage of the evolving covid-19 pandemic as if there must be one definitive solution to the burgeoning number of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. We want to reduce a complex set of public health issues to simple “good guys/bad guys” scenarios. 

“Tell us the answer,” we demand. 

We may frame successive revisions in advice from the CDC or the WHO as evidence of unreliability, rather than as responses to changes in viral variants, levels of contagion and community spread, and mortality/morbidity rates. We may try to assign blame for the initial spread of the virus, as if calling the pandemic the “kung flu” could impact the pandemic’s current global trajectory or destruction. We may try to discount scientists wrestling with a hugely complicated global health challenge as “elitist,” preferring to believe whichever online media pundit best fits our preexisting biases. None of these reductionist ploys coincides with the “truth of covid-19” as we know it so far.

One of my more recent reads touched on the equally divisive issue of climate change. In A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism, historian-author Patrick Allitt quoted former climate scientist and member of the Intergovernmental  Panel on Climate Change, Stephen Schneider. Schneider, until his death in 2010, was for many years a professor of biology at Stanford University. An early advocate of reforming public policies to mitigate and adapt to human-induced climate change, Schneider nonetheless recoiled from efforts to pin down exact consequences or remedies or to demonize climate skeptics. Schneider tried to explain, using terms that got and can get quoted out of context to support a variety of views:

“As scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. …This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope this means being both.”  (A lengthier version of Schneider’s views is available online at https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Mediarology/mediarology.html.) 

As I try to shield myself and my loved ones from the worst impacts of either potentially deadly viruses or equally deadly weather events and climate shifts, I take some solace in imagining Gandhi and Schneider in a vibrant afterlife, sharing insights and learning from each other’s experiments with truth. 

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Multi-layered Identities

Posted on September 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

Because I don’t live under a rock, it was probably inevitable that I’d eventually be exposed to the term “intersectionality.” As I understand it, the term was coined to express some of the complexity of our identities. It was originally proposed in 1989 by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, class, gender, and other characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap. Like so many terms that can get polarized, intersectionality has sometimes become a catch phrase, used to stigmatize people rather than to empower them. 

Part of me wants to resist being characterized as part of any group—evidence of the individualism, often overdone, that can be both blessing and bane in American society. Because I’m older, I remember that most labels we’ve used on each other and ourselves have changed over time. They can be used for praise or derision, construed differently by different people—European-American, white, honky, cracker, trailer trash; mixed race, African-American, black, colored, Negro, n*****; straight, gay, lesbian, gender-nonconforming, queer, fairy, fag; able-bodied, physically challenged, disabled, blind, deaf, gimpy, crippled; rich, poor, middle-class, economically challenged, worthless, parasitic; young, old, middle-aged, mature, over the hill, elderly, has-been, etc. etc. Especially since September 11, 2001, we’ve too frequently tended to conflate “Moslem” with “terrorist,” and/or to label immigrants as trespassers. 

Some of the labels applied to me put me in a “dominant” or advantaged group; others put me at a disadvantage. It can get confusing and irritating at times. It helps if I can recognize myself as a complex, flawed, redeemable human being. I’m better than the worst things I’ve ever done, yet rarely as good as my best self. I’d like to be able to answer to a characterization as an aging seeker capable of occasional flashes of humor and perspective.   

Having recently relocated to a new physical environment, I sometimes attempt here to go nameless and label-less. If pressed, I tend to respond with my given name, and then to ask, in what I hope is a neighborly way, “Who are you, and what would you like to be called?”  

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On Being Undocumented, Uncomfortable, and Racist

Posted on June 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

Last month I moved from central North Carolina to southern California. I was fortunate to be able to move by choice. Still, moving always poses challenges. Now most of my extended family is in a different time zone from me. Connections from my old location have been broken. We don’t have enough chairs. I don’t have automated payment accounts for local utilities. I don’t have a local doctor, dentist, or even a health care plan. I don’t know any of the local bakeries, take-out joints or restaurants. A good bit of the time, I feel lost. One of the most disorienting aspects of my “new life” is being relatively undocumented—no local driver’s license, no local bank, no supermarket chain I recognize, no voter ID, no links to local media channels. My challenges are minor, but I SO want my current uncertainty to end!  

In my old location, I’d counted myself a white liberal. I thought I’d worked through issues surrounding whiteness in 21st century America. I’d participated in marches and protests, listened to Rev. William Barber’s impassioned, informative speeches about racial inequities, given money and time to progressive causes. In my new location, many people around me speak other languages instead of or in addition to English. I feel vaguely threatened. 

A few days ago, I got a packet of forwarded mail containing monthly magazines with articles examining U.S. historical racism and still unresolved racial and ethnic tensions. One article described the “race card project” started by journalist Michele Norris in 2010. She’d initially asked 200 people to send her their thoughts about race, distilled into just six words (theracecardproject.com). A real challenge for somebody as wordy as I am! What popped into my head was succinct, embarrassing, and accurate: “I thought I owned the place.”  

In school in the 1950’s I’d been taught that European settlers had “conquered the wilderness,” “shown pioneer spirit,” “plowed the prairie,” “expanded the frontier,” “defeated the savage Indians,” “fulfilled manifest destiny,” etc., etc.  Once I began to read and travel more widely, I learned some limits of this Eurocentric viewpoint.

In my new home, adding to my disorientation is discomfort at having to further relinquish my former historical narrative. The version of U.S. history and growth I still partially carry around inside me has been at best incomplete, at worst, deliberately falsified. For thousands of years before the earliest European explorers came to North America, indigenous people lived in what is now the United States. Much of the hard manual labor to create the agricultural and industrial economies of our country was done either by enslaved Africans or by poorly paid Chinese and other Asians. Currently, much agricultural and caregiving work is done by low-paid latino/latina immigrants. I now live on land stolen from indigenous tribespeople.

Some of my ancestors were slaveholders. Even the majority, those who didn’t directly benefit from slavery or subsequent Jim Crow laws, had access to financial support and government programs that were effectively, if not officially, racially biased. Being “racist” applies not just to members of the KKK or white people who use the “N” word or anyone who makes disparaging remarks about “those people.” A racist can be someone of any background (though in the U.S. usually white) who benefits explicitly or implicitly from a system of arbitrary advantage. That includes me. 

The people in line with me at the DMV yesterday came in all shapes, colors, and sizes, spoke with lots of different accents. Many DMV employees could speak two languages or even more. Might I have to own up to my lingering biases, to adapt and participate in a more diverse culture here? 

What I’m experiencing mimics some stages of grieving laid out in earlier research on death and dying: 1) denial, 2) anger, 3) bargaining, 4) depression and 5) acceptance. I seem partly to be cycling through the first four stages of grieving, grieving the death of the myth of white supremacy:

1) Who, me, a racist? 2) How dare you! 3) Look, I can show you my NAACP card. 4) I will never get this right.  

Many of my background may be experiencing grief stages as well. If we are ever to coalesce as a fully multi-ethnic society, we’ll have to reject the myth of dominance, white or otherwise. We’ll have to temper our denial, anger, bargaining, or depression. Instead, whoever we are, whatever our backgrounds, we’ll need to more fully accept and embrace the humor, resilience, and graciousness that are also part of the human heritage.    

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The Politics of Human Reproduction

Posted on March 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

As a post-menopausal woman, I’m no longer directly impacted by the twists and turns of abortion debates and legislation. During my fertile years, I was privileged to live in areas where reliable contraception was available and reproductive options were improving. I was blessed with two much-wanted, much-loved children and a long-term partner who helped provide both material and emotional support as we navigated the great adventure of parenting. Once our children were past their most vulnerable years, I chose to end my fertility early, in part to avoid overpopulating an already human-crowded planet. 

Therefore my initial strong reaction to coverage of the “fetal heartbeat bill” passed recently in neighboring South Carolina surprised me. This particular fight has long since been joined by still-fertile women. I have no direct interest. Why, then, did a still photo of South Carolina governor Henry Dargan McMaster, an older somewhat sanctimonious male, white, signing South Carolina’s Senate Bill 1 while surrounded by other mostly older men, mostly white, plus a few women, rankle me so? On reflection, I suspect it’s a combination of personal and societal history.

Until after I was grown and married, I had little notion what abortion was. After a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalized abortions under certain circumstances, protracted legal and political battles erupted. Political candidates and office holders were sometimes judged primarily or solely based on their stance on this one issue. Through decades of debate, I’ve been exposed to lots of “pro-life”  and “pro-choice” publicity. Arguments at both extremes disturb me. I lean toward a “pro-choice” stance, but remember, too, the moral ambiguity captured in author Gwendolyn Brooks’ haunting 1945 poem “The Mother” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43309/the-mother-56d2220767a02). 

In early 1975, when my husband dropped me off to get a pregnancy test at a women’s health clinic, to confirm what we both hoped would be true, I had to walk a gauntlet of anti-abortion protesters shouting, waving signs, and thrusting literature into my hands about the sanctity of all life. It did not seem to occur to these zealots that a women’s health clinic might perform services other than abortions. Their brochures contained images of a generic early-term fetus. In decades since, while driving through parts of the U.S. South, I’ve seen similar fetal images on huge roadside billboards. One even advertised a “pro-life registrar of wills.”

The particular legislation just passed in South Carolina does not directly penalize women seeking abortions, but makes performing an abortion after a “detectable heartbeat” (typically between 6 and 8 weeks of gestation) a felony, with possible hefty fines and up to two years of jail time. The South Carolina bill is among a number of recent bills, most enacted in poorer Southern states, circumscribing legal abortions to the point that they become nearly inaccessible to poor and at-risk women.

Globally, both the incidence of abortion and the legal restrictions placed on it have been declining in recent years, with only five countries (El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Malta) placing total or near-total bans on the procedure. Between 1994 and 2014, the incidence of abortion in industrialized countries declined 19%. Rates of abortion are roughly comparable worldwide, whatever a particular nation’s abortion policy—estimated at between 34 and 37 per thousand women annually. (For more information, see https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(16)30380-4.pdf). What differs markedly are the rates of maternal injury and death resulting from unsafe abortions (see https://www.who.int/health-topics/abortion#tab=tab_2). 

What has often non-plussed me about the abortion debate, in the U.S. and globally, is how much it tries to compartmentalize the period of gestation, making it ostensibly separate from the periods before and after a pregnancy. Though alternative pregnancy options such as surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, and even transgender pregnancy are becoming more available in industrialized countries (though hugely expensive), the proportion of such pregnancies is small. The vast majority of fetuses are the result of male/female intercourse. 

What about the fathers-to-be? What are their roles? What legislation impacts them? More to the point, once a baby is born, what support is provided by someone other than the mother, be it another family member or an institution? We can too often seem lax in our efforts to provide the “village” it takes to raise a child. In 2021, I can find myself  juxtaposing fetal images with images of starving children in war-torn Yemen, their heads disproportionately large in comparison to their shriveled bodies (https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2021-01-04/yemeni-boy-ravaged-by-hunger-weighs-7-kg).

On this International Women’s Day, I can applaud some of the improvements made in fetal, maternal, and child health globally. I can honor SC Governor McMaster’s wife and daughter. I can listen to the beating of my own heart. I can honor women’s choices around the issue of childbearing, while I hope and work for a society that concentrates less on what happens inside the womb and more on what happens in the world into which babies are born. 

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The Longest Year

Posted on March 3, 2021 | Leave a comment

This day last year, March 3, 2020, marked the first reported cases of covid here in North Carolina. It was also the day of our presidential primary. As of today, we’ve logged over 11,000 covid-related deaths in our state, over half a million in our country. We have a different President, after an election process fraught with tension and followed by an insurrection. It seems like a very long year. 

As the pandemic began to impact us, we were told at first not to wear face masks. Hospitals and health workers were short of personal protective gear, so any available supplies were needed for them. Starting March 10, 2020, North Carolina’s governor began issuing a whole string of executive orders aimed at containing or mitigating the spread of the virus. A “stay at home” phase began March 30. Executive Order 121 enjoined residents “to stay at home except to visit essential businesses, to exercise outdoors or to help a family member. Specifically, the order bans gatherings of more than 10 people and directs everyone to physically stay at least 6 feet apart from others.” Schools had closed. Parents and teachers scrambled to come up with alternative child care arrangements and virtual learning plans. Stores sold out of paper goods. Small businesses and communities of color were among the worst impacted. 

Nationally, our then-President predicted that the virus would disappear on its own. Locally, most social, religious and philanthropic groups canceled in-person meetings and began congregating in virtual spaces. Public service announcements advised us to “flatten the curve,” so that caseload spikes did not overwhelm the health care system. As spring limped toward summer, cases seemed to dip, then surge, then dip, then surge again in mind-numbing seesaws. Our regional newspaper printed the statistics of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths along the edge of its front page, a sort of grisly “box score.” Whether or not to hold in-person political rallies became a political issue of its own.  

If it was an uneasy summer for all, it was especially trying for those impacted by extra-judicial police killings captured on mobile phone video. Protests erupted across the nation and around the world. Through it all, even mask wearing got politicized. 

Fall brought additional complications, as jurisdictions tried to come up with safe yet inclusive ways to hold an election during a pandemic. Non-partisan election workers needed to be hired, trained, retrained, and/or retained as procedures changed, election boards jockeyed for adequate protective equipment and supplies, and the elder-skewed workforce from prior elections debated whether to risk possible infection by working in 2020. By election day, voter participation rates had surpassed records going back over a century. In our county, the proportion of absentee ballots quadrupled. 

It took what seemed like forever to ascertain a winner of the presidential race, amid delayed counts, recounts, and multitudes of court cases. The loser refused to concede, opting instead to allege massive voter fraud, unsubstantiated by anything other than his massively distorted ego. Thousands of his most avid supporters came to Washington D.C. on January 6. After he addressed a rally near the White House, some of them went to the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the certification of electoral college results. A few nearly succeeded. Their actions continue to roil our politics, just as the pandemic is starting to be dented by more widespread vaccinations and better compliance with public health measures, just as financial relief for the neediest works its way through Congress. 

It’s my fervent prayer that the next twelve months will seem less endless than the preceding twelve, that some of the underlying societal ills laid bare by the pandemic will be tackled with more than lip service, and that our understanding of our dependence on the natural world will deepen. A small answer and blessing blooms in a tree well near our townhouse—this year’s first daffodils. 

First daffodils, spring 2021

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McCarthy’s Ghost, Slavery’s Ghosts, Learning All the Verses

Posted on January 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

I write this on the morning of January 7, 2021, after a 24 hours that tried American democracy in ways not seen for a while. Our electoral system has survived a challenge. Once an unruly mob was finally cleared from the U.S. Capitol, both houses of the U.S. Congress debated and then certified the electoral victory of Joseph R. Biden, Jr. to become the 46th President of the United States. However, challenges remain. Amid a global pandemic, social problems abound. The reputation of the U.S.A. as a beacon of democracy has been badly tarnished, if not destroyed.

I was born into a United States of America reeling from World War II plus the dawn of the nuclear age. My childhood was spent in the shadow of possible thermonuclear war. Our family lived close to Washington D.C.  A nuclear attack on the U.S. capital city would lead to our deaths—from the blast itself or more slowly from radiation poisoning. Nuclear danger from our postwar rival, the communist Soviet Union (USSR), was real but hard to gauge.

Postwar tensions had helped change the make-up of the U.S. Congress. During the early 1950’s, a first-term Senator from Wisconsin made headlines about the alleged presence of “Communist infiltrators” in American government and media. Joseph R. McCarthy’s initial list of possible infiltrators and spies grew, leading to the blacklisting of many left-leaning writers, artists and civil libertarians. In early 1954, hearings about McCarthy’s attempted meddling in the U.S. Army were broadcast on television, a TV first. The senator was shown, per multiple sources, as “bullying, reckless, and dishonest.” (See partial transcript, including Army Special Counsel Welch’s “Have you no sense of decency?” quote at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6444/).  In retrospect, we realize that the distortions introduced by McCarthy made it more difficult to distinguish actual threats from malicious character assassination and misinformation. Later in 1954, McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate. Although he remained in office, his influence waned. He died of liver failure in 1957. 

One of McCarthy’s chief advisors, Roy Cohn, went on to mentor real estate developer and 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, a master at social media. We still live with McCarthy’s ghost. Late yesterday, two prominent social media outlets, Facebook and Twitter, belatedly and temporarily deactivated Mr. Trump’s accounts. His posts had helped incite what became a full-blown riot and assault on the United States Capitol. He continued to spread false allegations about the election’s outcome.

Our country’s Declaration of Independence proclaims as self-evident that “all (men) are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We are taught from an early age to revere this founding document. What we are not taught, or taught only much later, is that about a third of the signers of the Declaration, including coauthor Thomas Jefferson, were slaveholders. 

We still live with slavery’s ghosts. The inherent contradiction between professed equality and the myth of white supremacy poisons our civic life. This past summer, widespread multiracial demonstrations against police brutality and racial injustice highlighted flaws in our criminal justice system. Since the outbreak of covid-19 related illnesses in the U.S., disparities in their impacts on communities of color have spotlighted lingering health and economic imbalances. Our education system’s attempts to adapt to remote learning further implicates the divides we’ve created in information access.

 I was brought up in a mainline Protestant congregation, taught the importance of loving our neighbors and ourselves. During the 1950’s at our small stone church, I was also exposed to lots of MAGA-style American exceptionalism and triumphalism. We frequently sang a hymn that I grew to dislike as I became a young woman, though its ghosts persist. It seemed sexist and militaristic and badly out of date:

Lead on, O King Eternal,
the day of march has come;
henceforth in fields of conquest,
thy tents shall be our home.
Through days of preparation
thy faith has made us strong;
and now, O King eternal,
we lift our battle song.

(In my initial interpretation, the third verse, about crowns and conquest and a mighty God,  seemed also to revert to militaristic themes.) 

What I much preferred was the second verse:

Lead on, O King eternal,
till sin’s fierce war shall cease,
and holiness shall whisper
the sweet amen of peace.
For not with swords loud clashing,
nor roll of stirring drums;
with deeds of love and mercy
the heavenly kingdom comes.

This morning I delved into the origins and evolution of this hymn. The lyric was composed as part of a seminary graduation ceremony, a rousing send-off for newly minted ministers. Ernest W. Shurtleff, its author, was among the graduates from Andover Theological Seminary in 1887. He served several American congregations before moving to Europe in 1905. From 1906 until the start of World War I, he was director of student activities at a Paris school. He then did war relief work in France until his death in Paris in 1917. Subsequent variations of the hymn’s lyric have adopted more inclusive language, such as one referring to the Biblical story of the exodus and “O Cloud of Presence.”  More recent interpretations make clearer that the “battles” Shurtleff envisioned were spiritual rather than temporal. (See a longer explanation in https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/articles/history-of-hymns-lead-on-o-king-eternal.)  

The inscription on Shurtleff’s tombstone ends with this summation: 

The path of the just is
as the shining light.

May we follow this light through whatever darkness lies ahead. May we react to yesterday’s travesties with outrage, yes, but also with deeds of love and mercy toward our neighbors and ourselves.  

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