Tag: thoughts and opinions

Why downballot candidates matter

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One of the things I’ve learned, as I’ve become more politically engaged the past four years, is just how important local elected officials are.

It’s primary time here in Arizona, so I thought I’d talk about why a few of the most-overlooked, county-level offices on the ballot matter in all communities, as well as giving some recs for the candidates in my community, Pima County.

Starting from the very bottom of the ballot:

Constable

Why this position matters: Constables serve papers— including eviction notices. That potentially puts them at the forefront of eviction policy reform—where they have power to help more people stay in their homes, and to provide more support to those who are evicted.

A dedicated group of Pima County constables have done just that. They launched a pilot program that gives those being evicted several days notice instead of the fifteen minutes that had been standard—time that helps evictees accept the reality of their situation make plans. The constable have also worked to get more resources to those being evicted, including information about housing grants, and they’ve pushed for a freeze on evictions during the Covid-19 crisis.

Four years ago I had no idea what constables did. Now I know they literally have the power to save lives, if they choose to use it.

My recommendations: Joe Ferguson (JP 9), Kristen Randall (JP 8), and Bennett Bernal (JP 6) have been at the forefront of eviction reform here. They deserve to—and Pima County needs them to—continue this work.

County Recorder

Why this office matters: The county recorder handles all things voting—registration, polling places, mail-in ballots, and so on. She’s also in a position to address barriers that keep people from voting and to make voting more equitable—things at the very heart of our democracy.

My recommendation: Gabriella Cázares-Kelly has a long history of voter outreach within the Tohono O’odham reservation and throughout Pima county. She has a master’s degree in higher education, experience encouraging civic engagement as a co-founder of the grassroots organizing group Indivisible Tohono, and is president of the Progressive Democrats of Southern Arizona.

She’s also one of the most dedicated people I know, and as county recorder she’ll work tirelessly to make voting more accessible in underrepresented communities.

County Attorney

Why this office matters: The county attorney oversees the local criminal justice system—and so has the power to reform it.

My recommendation: Laura Conover won’t settle for maintaining the current status quo. She’s committed to criminal justice reform and opposed to maintaining the status quo. A former public defender now in private practice, she promises to end the county’s policy of pursuing felony prosecutions for minor, nonviolent crimes.

County Supervisor

Why this office matters: The county board of supervisors (in some places called the board of commissioners) oversees county services and controls the county budget. They set policies related to public health, economic development, community safety, management of natural resources, and countless other things (including, in Pima County, the local animal shelter).

Supervisors also have the power to accept or reject grants, something that became critical when community members drew attention to Pima County’s routine acceptance of Operation Stonegarden grants, which fund collaboration between local law enforcement and border patrol—and in doing so both harm vulnerable families and cost the county money via indirect expenses. Thanks to community engagement, the county ultimately rejected these funds, a move with not only local but also national implications.

Wherever you live, give your downballot candidates some attention and research and love this primary season—and in November. In the end, they truly do have as much power to change lives as the upballot headliners do.

Masking up

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Confession: The first time I stepped outside wearing a face mask, I almost took it off again.

I try not to care what other people think, but walking through my neighborhood, mask covering more than half my face, it felt like surely everyone I walked past was staring at me.

I could have taken the mask off, if I really wanted to. Outdoors, it was easy to keep my distance from my fellow quarantine walkers, and the main thing my mask was protecting me from was probably seasonal allergies. But this was a trial run. If I couldn’t wear a mask now, out in the open, walking by myself, how would I wear it all the other, more critical, places I needed to wear it?

I kept my mask on. In the U.S. we were just beginning to understand how important mask wearing was in protecting our communities from Covid-19. I knew this was something I had to get used to.

[Me in a dark pink mask]
It’s really not that hard. And yet …

I did get used to it, and now, a couple months later, it’s a habit. A couple months has also given me time to think about where my initial resistance came from.

Before Covid-19, I’d only very occasionally seen anyone wearing a mask in public before. When I did see someone wearing a mask, my first thought was, “I wonder what’s going on with them?” I would have denied it if you asked, but I realize now that masks were, to me, a sign of frailty, of physical weakness.

I didn’t understand, yet, what those in a great many other countries where masks were more common knew instinctively: that you don’t wear a mask to protect yourself, but to protect those around you.

Indeed, I also realize now that I thought of mask wearing as something that people did in other places, but not here, as if we didn’t all share the same biology, the same vulnerability to disease.

I wonder whether some of those refusing to wear masks have had similar thoughts, consciously or unconsciously, but have failed to recognize and push past them, and so have grown defensive instead.

In the end, knowing masks were necessary made me push past my own resistance, but it didn’t make me feel comfortable doing so.

It was seeing others wearing masks that did that.

On that first walk, mask wearers were few and far between, but I wasn’t the only one. Whenever I saw another walker wearing a mask, I waved, and they waved back, and as I walked on, I felt more at ease with my own mask, and less self-conscious. I wasn’t alone, and neither were they.

As masks have become more widespread, that feeling has grown stronger, and wearing a mask doesn’t feel all that awkward now.

[Four masks with various patterns]
My growing mask collection.

There’s a need to for more messaging, more education, on why masks are needed, as well as more political will, in my community at least, to enforce mask mandates.

But I wonder whether, in the end, the most effective way to get others to wear masks is simply to continue wearing our own.

Some less frequently quoted words from Reverend King

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Because as powerful as the “I Have a Dream” speech is, many of Martin Luther King, Jr’s other words were powerful, too.

“A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
— “Beyond Vietnam,” Riverside Church, New York

 “For here on either side of the wall are God’s children and no man-made barrier can obliterate that fact. Whether it be East or West, men and women search for meaning, hope for fulfillment, yearn for faith in something beyond themselves, and cry desperately for love and community to support them in this pilgrim journey.”
— Sermon at St. Mary’s Church, East Berlin

“It’s possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho Road is a dangerous road … And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around … And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”
— “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Bishop Charles Mason Temple, Memphis

“We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.”
— “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

“But there was never a conflict between religion and science as such. There cannot be. Their respective worlds are different. Their methods are dissimilar and their immediate objectives are not the same. The method of science is observation, that of religion contemplation. Science investigates. Religion interprets. One seeks causes, the other ends. Science thinks in terms of history, religion in terms of teleology. One is a survey, the other an outlook.”
— “Science and Religion”

“We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”
— “Beyond Vietnam,” Riverside Church, New York

 “Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”
— “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

“On some positions cowardice asks the question, ‘is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
— “A Proper Sense of Priorities,” Washington, DC

But seriously, muskoxen are awesome

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Puzzled by the president’s recent interest in purchasing Greenland? Yeah, me too. Fortunately, the internet is a veritable treasure trove of inaccurate unreliable poorly-sourced easy-to-find information, and it was but the work of a few minutes and one too many blue raspberry Eegees to track down the top reasons Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland.
  1. It’s the largest country on the map in the Situation Room.
  2. Not enough muskoxen at Mar-a-Lago.
  3. If he doesn’t act now, those damn liberals might amend the Constitution to prohibit buying and selling people.
  4. Sea ice futures. They’re a thing.
  5. The Flores settlement only applies to holding families in detention, not to abandoning them on Arctic islands.
  6. Obama never tried to buy an autonomous Danish territory, now, did he?
  7. No one on the moon will return the president’s calls.
  8. He called dibs, so there.

“… a torch whose flame is the imprisoned lightning”

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In 1903 Emma Lazarus famously wrote “The New Colossus,” a poem the Statue of Liberty that concludes

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

In 2019–specifically, earlier this week—Ken Cuccinelli infamously edited that poem to say

Give me your tired and your poor
who can stand on their own two feet
and who will not become a public charge

In addition to being offensive, ignorant of history, and—coming from the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services—outright dangerous, Cuccinelli’s words are, well, terrible poetry.

Which got me wondering: What would happen if other classic poems were revised from a similar perspective?

Possibly something like this.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

if you really
wanted them
you should have come here legally

(Original: “This is Just to Say,” by William Carlos Williams)

And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, don’t despair,
We can raise taxes on the poor until
This monument stands forever in the
Sand, beside the casino and housing
Development that also bear my name.’

(Original: “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer,
But it isn’t my fault that freeloading falcon
Didn’t work harder and buy health insurance that covered better hearing aids.

(Original: “The Second Coming,” by W B Yeats)

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood and I—
I fracked and mined and dug a pipeline beneath the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

(Original: “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost)

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin—’
‘First show me your papers, ‘ the Mariner said,
‘Then maybe I’ll let you in.’

(Original: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

And of course, music is poetry too.

This land is my land this land is my land
This land is my land this land is my land
This land is my land this land is my land
This land was made for me just me

(Original: “This Land is Your Land,” by Woody Guthrie)

Have any other updates to suggest? Share them in comments.

“The world is a narrow bridge / but the main thing is not to fear”

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I first learned about the 1980s Sanctuary movement from Tucson’s Rabbi Joe Weizenbaum. He said he remembered being asked, from time to time, why he was a part of a largely church-led movement. His response, which I can no longer remember word for word, was to the effect that Sanctuary wasn’t just a Christian business—that we Jews belonged there too.

I thought about Rabbi Joe’s words after watching yesterday’s nationwide #JewsAgainstIce protests against the internment and abuse of immigrants and asylum-seekers in ICE detention camps, held on Tisha b’Av, a Jewish day of deep mourning.

And I especially thought about them after hearing the protesters singing.

I’d gotten so used to songs of protest being either Christian or secular. I knew that the songs I grew up singing in synagogue—the songs that I still sing there, and at home as well—had things to say about survival and justice and healing the world, but those weren’t the songs that I sang while holding signs at rallies and marches and in front of my representatives’ offices.

So hearing protestors singing Oseh Shalom, or Gesher Tzar Me’od, or Hinei Ma Tov—it broke me open a little, in a good way. It said to me not just that Jews belong here, but that we’re needed, that we’re here for a reason, that have our own unique and critical role to play, a part of the larger picture where so many people are playing unique and critical roles to heal this country and this world.

I’m sharing some clips of that music—so that I can come back to them when I need to, so that I can share them, so that you can hear them too.

Inside the ICE detention center in Seattle yesterday. Hinei Ma Tov … “How good it is when all of us dwell together.” https://twitter.com/neveragainactn/status/1159593507545329666?s=21
At the Amazon store in New York yesterday (Amazon has contracts to provide technology to ICE). Gesher Tsar Me’Od … “The world is a narrow bridge, but the main thing is not to fear.” https://twitter.com/elivalley/status/1160668337355055105
Outside ICE headquarters in Washington, DC last month.Oseh Shalom … “May the one who makes peace in the heavens make peace for us and for all the world.” https://twitter.com/maxwellkayton/status/1151204497055727616?s=20
And back in Seattle again, not a song, but the Mourner’s Kaddish. https://twitter.com/NeverAgainActn/status/1159600823187456002?s=20

Truth, Justice, and Oversharing

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Are you planning to turn your television to a non-Inauguration station tomorrow to help lower the Inauguration’s ratings? If so, you forgot to verify what you read before accepting it. Because unless you’re a member of a Nielsen family, what you watch likely won’t affect anyone but you. This isn’t the only example I could use (it’s unlikely Paul Ryan has disconnected his phones, too, just for starters), and I’m not sharing it to shame those who happen not to know what a Nielsen family is. I’m sharing it because one of the big lessons of the past election season, it seems to me, was that no matter what our political leanings are, we have got got GOT to get back into the habit of questioning what we read, even if–especially if–it agrees with what we already suspect to be true. We have to start asking, “Where did this information come from?” We have to start looking for known, reliable sources, and asking who THEIR sources are, and visiting reliable fact checking sites. We have to get back to reading and listening with a healthy dose of skepticism, to knowing when to look at something and say “REALLY? SERIOUSLY?” We need to re-learn the difference between fact and interpretation, between drawing our own conclusions and creating our own reality. After tomorrow, telling what is and isn’t true will likely get a lot harder. If we believe–and share–blindly, we become part of the problem, helping to spread false information and so making it that much harder to find the facts in a sea of distorted truths and flat-out fictional inventions. If we believe blindly, we deny ourselves the information we need to know where and how to act, and we become easy prey for any passing piece of propaganda that contains some kernel of what we believe or want to believe. We move from false outrage to false outrage, and along the way miss the real outrages that need our attention. So turn your television to whatever station you want; it won’t really matter. In the years ahead, a lot of other things will.

The day before

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The day before the peaceful transfer of power to those who seem to care little for peace, I headed out to a city park and walked in the bracing chill of a soft gray morning. I looked up at the cloud-muted mountains. Watched a long-legged egret make its careful way around a pond. I gathered in energy and strength and calm for the days ahead. I recommitted to art and to action and to figuring out how the two fit together. I won’t say everything’s going to be all right, but the mountains and the egret and the pond are still here. We are still here. We’ll do what we can, fight what we must, succeed and fail, fall down and get up again. That in itself is a victory. We are here.