Transformations: What IS Labor 2 Bear Down?

by Lucy S.

I began this blog in the heart of winter (mid-January in this upper Midwest) thinking about the ways in which we labor to bring life into existence – new human beings who have not been in this world before, or something new in ourselves and each other, or something we create with an essence of life somehow infused in it.  And now I’m thinking about the ways in which humble steadiness is braided with bursts of passion and grueling pushes at crucial moments and a different humility which is the willingness to vulnerably open ourselves up and which is paradoxically humble enough to be proud enough to just try and then keep trying. I keep thinking about questions of creation and care and labor. Where does one leave off and the other begin?

What is work? It is no accident that the word is used in such down-to-earth and lofty ways (“Hey, so where do you work?” and “We’re studying the work of [this great painter or that vital poet]” and “I’m working in the garden” and I’ve got a lot of housework to do” and “It takes work to raise a child.”) Why is some work lauded and other work (and the long hours and years of people’s lives who do it) taken for granted? Why is some work materially compensated fairly and other work compensated poorly or not at all? Why do some workers have autonomy over their work and others have little or none?

What is the work of our own lives and our own selves? What is the painting called “Gloria: the Adult Years” or the musical collection called “Justin: Son, Brother, Friend, Tutor, Writer, Worker, Composer”? What is the massive tapestry depicting “Josefina: Birth to 35”? What is the miraculous garment with moving beings enacting “Marion: a Life Working”?  (That is my mother, who can take on almost any project she sets her mind to by just methodically determining what is needed and then working away at it, step by step.) What is the epic poem called simply and yet complexly “Amir”? What is the course we might teach based upon the literary-pedagogical-creative nonfiction narrative of the same name: “Dan: Teacher-Learner-Reader-Writer-Seeker”? What is the classic movie: “Sean Michael”? What is that multi-part play, experimentally unfolding even as the audiences watch – the performance: “Jonathan: Enacting Movement”? What is the biography entitled: “Kevin: Making of a 21^st Century Wobbly”? And what is that unclassifiable other musical collection called “Ryan Nathaniel: a Childhood in Place”?

(I find myself wanting to go on with this: “Ana: the Dance of a Life”….)

Every life matters. That is what I believe and what I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, over and over.

There are times when our lives are especially in transition. The past four years have been that way for me. Going back to school to finish my B.A. and then continuing on into a master’s program to now find myself at long last in a position to teach college classes has radically changed, and continues to change, my life. 

It is so strange and amazing to find myself able to do things that I could not do before, whether because I didn’t have those skills or because I lacked the certifications or training. All along the way, there have been so many times when I kept thinking, “I can’t do this; I can’t do this; I can’t do this.”  I feel sorry for myself too often; I don’t trust fully enough; I forget to be adequately thankful; I find so many flaws in myself.  I try to meaningfully critique the system (and its smaller, specific instantiations) and hit the wall short of the mark, sliding down. But it seems to me that this might be how lives are actually lived and how transformations occur. 

Sometimes, as on this sunny late June day with tomatoes finally turning red and the doors and windows wide open and me on my way to talk with a professor I know and like about the possibilities of teaching after talking with a great friend last night who reminded me that so much is possible (as he has always made me realize) – sometimes we can be gracious and hopeful and throw off self-pitying despair to take a look around and really see ourselves and each other and what these lives of ours are, and how splendid they are in their steady, humble, bold, brave, clumsy, exquisite beauty.

It is time for a change in this project here, time to bring in others by talking with them about their own lives, hopes, despairs, insights, transformations across time – their deep wells of care, their labor. 

Homeschooling and Academia: Am I a Teacher?

 by Lucy S.

I am trying to line up work to teach as an adjunct next fall, now that I have a master’s degree (which still feels surreal and wondrous to me). 

And I am struggling to not be submerged by waves of defeatism and pain as I realize that I still may not have what it takes to teach. The community college closest to me, only a couple miles away, requires a minimum of one year of teaching experience. I am not sure yet what the requirements are of the other state community colleges in this area, but I worry that they may have similar policies. I have talked with a faculty member in the program I graduated from and he will meet with me next week to talk more about this.

A friend who teaches at another community college allowed me to visit her composition class last week. I LOVED it.  I took notes the whole time, paying close attention to how she moved the class along – a long class that runs from 11:15 am to 2 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s accelerated because it’s summer.  This friend was once a professor of mine at my undergraduate university.  She used to get deeply depressed struggling to line up work that paid anywhere near a living wage.  When I met her, she was making $12,000 a year and paying $400 a month for health insurance because of a pre-existing eye condition.  Her partner thus paid a large percentage of their living expenses out of her much higher wages. My friend had a PhD in English. At one point, she considered pursuing work as a barista at one of the corporate coffee chains. These kinds of experiences hurt so badly. They can scrape out a person’s sense of self-worth and leave them struggling to sustain the capacity to continue pursuing work. Others who don’t understand can wonder or even ask what is wrong with you. They assume – and you may begin to agree – that there must be some profound lack in you that has resulted in your inability to find work in your field. But at last, she lined up work as an adjunct, and now she is tenured. I am so glad for her. I know how much this meant. And when I visited her class recently, I was so impressed with her teaching and the ways that she treats the students.

I drove home that day feeling elated. This was what I had wanted for so many years – to teach college English classes. I know I will probably never get tenure, and I know they pay $3,000 per semester per class, and they take up a huge amount of time for that $3,000 (and this varies widely – some pay far less). But I want to teach composition and literature. I kept thinking: after all of this time, I am finally almost there.  Gratitude and excitement surged through me that afternoon.

My friend did mention, as we talked briefly after class, that she was surprised that I had no teaching experience in my program. And I felt something scared and pained catch in me, but happiness overwhelmed that bit of panic.

I do have some teaching experience. I taught an ESL class during the spring of 2012 (though not for pay). And I’ve tutored ESL a few semesters (and a lot more times informally over the years) – again, not for pay. And I worked in a high school one semester, doing individual or small group tutoring – a high school with immigrant students ages 18-22 trying to get that diploma. That was a work-study job, so I was paid for that one. But I can’t think of any other relevant experience. Well, I worked in the college writing center years ago when I went to California community college in the late 1980s. But it’s impossible for anyone to even document that anymore. And it’s so long ago that it means nothing.

Well, and there is this other experience that I have teaching. I homeschooled my five kids. I am still homeschooling the youngest two. One is in the age range of that high school’s demographics. He has some learning difficulties, so I have had to work with him at his pace.  He continues to learn! And to be quite honest, I think what we do is far more substantial than much of what I saw going on in that high school when I worked there. I felt so angry at times to see the days and weeks and months wasted of students, tutors, and teachers doing busy work that failed to teach much except cynicism. But that experience counts, and my experience teaching my kids does not.

We continue studying during the summer. Lately, Sean and Ryan and I are reading Robert Frost poems. We had a poignant discussion last week about Frost’s brilliant, achingly sad poem, “Home Burial.” It is a poem about a husband and wife whose baby has died, and their inability to reach one another across their private walls of devastation, loss, and judgments about how the other one should respond to their child’s death. We are also reading Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.  We recently made a list of the books we’ve read together, and we feel a bit impressed with ourselves -- impressed with the weight of what we all have to draw on, individually and in our collective conversations and engagements. I will post that list separately.

The way I have always taught my kids is most of all to read with them and to talk with them.  There is the magic formula.  Well, and we watch movies and talk about those, also. And we talk about songs, and we talk quite a lot about the events going on in our own lives, the lives of people we know and love, and the larger societal or world events. We try to figure out better answers, but in doing so, we have to turn the problem over, examining it from a multitude of angles. I don’t mean that we bring any particular expertise to it. It is only that we keep reading, talking, questioning, and trying to act in the ways we manage to find available to us.  Of course, my formal education in these recent years has profoundly helped my ability to delve into these texts with them.

I would like to know why what I have done with my kids all these years (and sometimes with other kids) doesn’t count at all as ‘real’ work experience. I am not sure how the hirers imagine what we have done, but I wonder why they can’t even discuss it with me. Maybe they wonder how they could ever verify what I did, but quite honestly, having seen what I have seen in institutions, I know that the verifications offered there of one’s experience are not necessarily rock-solid, either. And in my pain, rightly or wrongly, I see their utter dismissal of my experience as one so thoroughly bound to the dismissal of so much of the labor traditionally done by women.

The day before yesterday, as the realization sunk in more fully that I may still be unqualified because of my lack of teaching experience, I crashed. I was trying to write a cover letter to send with my CV (academia’s version of a résumé) to the person hiring adjuncts at the program I just graduated from. He mentioned that the way graduates from our program typically demonstrate that they have the experience to take on teaching a college freshman composition course is by having worked as a teaching assistant one semester for a professor there. I didn’t do this. I was on a fast-moving fellowship that took up all of my waking hours my first semester and most of them my second and third semesters. (And here, my mind always interjects: but I was LUCKY to have this!)  I should have done it for that fourth and final semester, when I was working on my master’s essay. I didn’t realize I needed this. And now I keep thinking, how could I have not figured this out for myself?  I almost applied, but the graduate coordinator mentioned I would need permission from my final project advisor. And I was unofficially part of a difficult theory course. And I was still homeschooling. I wasn’t sure if it might be too much. I keep thinking now: how could I have been so stupid? And then I think: why didn’t they tell me that this was necessary? And then, like a blinking neon sign, the first question returns: but how could I have been so stupid? I looked at the samples for the cover letters, describing how the academic job seeker graduated with a PhD from a prominent university, has already taught a multitude of courses as a grad student, has published in academic journals… and I couldn’t get past a few sentences. What content could I interject into this letter of interest?  Why should they ever hire me over someone else?

I looked at a state college’s classes in teaching composition and wondered if maybe I should take some of those now, starting in the fall. It is a 1 ½ hour drive to that college. But I wrote to a friend of mine that I just didn’t think I could do it. I wrote that I can’t deal with this anymore.

I remember a time a few years ago when we were visiting my sister and some there were playing a board game at her kitchen table. Her son hadn’t won a round yet, after a long while. But at last – at last, he did.  Then his twin sister was confused and said, “No, Paul didn’t win that one.” And overcome with his sliced-open elation, he stood up on the bench, opened his mouth, and screamed a gut-wrenching cry, shaking with tears streaming down his face. That image has come back to me quite a few times in the past few days. I keep thinking, “Man, I’m with you, Paul. I know what you mean.” 

On that bitter Thursday (the day before yesterday), I wrote this about what we study and discuss in the academy. It was my own scream:

Let us talk about feminism, or more specifically, let us talk about the ways that women’s reproductive labor is appropriated in this society for no material compensation, and the ways in which that work is devalued (Federici).

And let us talk about the bitter, abundant evidence that the children of the working-classes and poverty classes do not by and large fare well in these capitalist government schools, because those schools mostly reproduce the same class structure in existence; many laborers are needed, after all, to serve those who live on their backs (Kozol, Freire, Bourdieu, hooks…).

Now tell me why it is that my twenty years teaching my kids outside of the schools, as we lived through the battering of this economic system, moving over and over – as the older ones had their lousy experiences in the schools, even though we tried – I tried – to make it work – tell me how it is that when I apply for an academic job teaching at a low wage that I would nonetheless be jumping with joy to receive right now – I can’t count that work. I don’t dare list that on a CV. Only those who haven’t lived these lives can theorize about them in the academy. Those who have lived too much of this aren’t fit enough to enter.

Well, if I can manage to get some OTHER experience as a TA under a REAL teacher – that could count. But when I tried to apply for one of those jobs as an undergrad T.A., I was not even interviewed for it. I didn’t even make it up to that level of consideration. And I DID, back then, dare to list experience teaching my kids and teaching homeschool classes. I think it was worse than if I’d listed nothing, because I think they interpret the inclusion as evidence that I – poor deluded person living outside of ‘real’ society all these years as a ‘housewife’ (a 'housewife' watching other people's kids and delivering papers and doing other 'flexible' work) – do not quite understand the ‘real world.’

(This makes me remember when I took a geology class with my oldest son – then 15 – my first venture back into a college class after more than ten years – a science with a lab class I had always needed for my general education requirements – still hoping so badly that I was still on my way back to getting a B.A. – and I asked the professor one day if instead of turning in the lab questions, I might take it with me to work on for a few hours before we met for the evening class (the lecture portion). The professor wrote all the answers on the board every week about an hour into lab, but I was tired of just copying them. I wanted to try to work them out and see if I could actually learn something. He said, in a rising voice that seemed to combine smugness and extreme irritation: “NO – you’ll turn it in now or you’ll take an F.”  Justin sat next to me with his own answers already copied out, watching. Stung and stunned, I asked, “Why?” He responded: “Because this is a college science laboratory course, and that’s the way things WORK – in the REAL world.”  I handed it to him and walked out with Justin beside me. A few steps past the door, I was already ranting about what an asshole that teacher was, how his whole life was so worthless, since he clearly didn’t even care about his work – how he was satisfied just having students copy down answers in his pointless class rather than actually try to learn. I was trying not to let that man make me cry. And trying to teach my son that people like that are NOT real teachers.)

Yes, I have quite a love / hate relationship with academia and its professors and administrators. I will always be working-class. There my loyalties lie. But sorting out what that means eludes me at times. What it does NOT mean is uneducated.

If I dare to list homeschooling as part of my teaching experience, I imagine the decision-makers thinking, “Poor thing – she might as well list playing with her dolls as a child and pretending to teach them as experience!!” Is it everything domestic that must be disdained? And what is ‘domestic’ anyway? Are they not domestic in some sense, too?

I don’t know how much of what I wrote is true. And I don’t know if I think of every disdainful way that they might sum me and my labor up as a way to bitterly beat them to the punch.

That day was awful. I cried so hard, harder than I’ve cried in a long time. I kept thinking, “So I still can’t even begin to support myself. After all this, I still can’t.” I kept feeling that everything was ruined.

But I woke up the next day realizing that there is nothing to do but keep trying. A good friend of mine tells me to always try for everything and to make others tell me no. He does the same. I know that I do have to keep trying. And I have to find a way to interrogate those who devalue the labor of people like me.  I have to do this in a way that doesn’t set us apart from other laborers, but instead identifies our commonalities with others who labor and are in a multitude of ways devalued and badly exploited.  

Today is my lifelong friend Gloria’s birthday. I called her this morning and we talked for a couple of hours. I hadn’t talked with her since she managed to get her job back after fighting for months. She, like me, is a mother, and she knows the devaluation of that labor in capitalist society. The equation is: that labor = no experience.  But she talked about how in her current job, she is held  under the thumb of supervisors and higher level management, people who warn workers like her that they’d “better watch it or you’ll be labeled a complainer…” Gloria has always been one of the hardest workers I know, and she used to give her all to the job she’s in, but she has finally learned, she said, that workers have to stick together.  She said she will never run herself ragged as she used to. This is part of class-knowledge.

(Happy Birthday, Gloria, my brave friend. You will always be a hero to me.)

But academia cannot be so neatly categorized as bosses versus workers, because the best professors are on OUR side. They are with us. Or they ARE us. So many are themselves exploited, not knowing if they will have jobs year to year. For so many, their own deep care for those whom they teach and their love for their work is used against them, just as parents who love their children can have that love used against them in this economic system. Yesterday morning, the professor from my graduate institution who I’d emailed about my efforts wrote back to suggest that we meet to talk about the possibilities. I know that this person cares and is trying to help me. And there is my friend who tells me to try for everything… and who has helped me through every step of this journey since I returned to school in 2009. There are others, too, in and out of academia.

When I visited the community college class, the students were discussing a chapter from Michelle Alexander’s powerful, crucial book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). Alexander writes of the many ways in which people with felonies are stripped of their rights by the U.S. legal system, and how racism is bound up in these practices. Some of the people in the class have felonies themselves. They are struggling so hard to ‘make it’ this time. In the chapter the class read, Alexander includes this by Frederick Douglass: "Men are so constituted that they derive their conviction of their own possibilities largely from the estimate formed of them by others" (143).

What is our estimate of one another? Are we all co-teachers and co-learners, as Paulo Freire insisted? Am I a teacher? Do I have experience? Are the people in that class human beings or are they “felons”?  What are our possibilities?

I believe in academia’s possibilities because of what I saw in that community college class last week. I believe in it because I know that there can be something so utterly affirming in it – tools to ‘speak truth’ to those that have us under their huge thumb, but even more, to one another. I believe in it because I know what it can be to come together in a class and talk about a poem like “Home Burial,” and I know that I talked about it with my kids in ways I would not have talked about it before I was in the American literature course in which we discussed it, or the other literature courses I have had that have helped teach me to sink into the moment and to truly see and listen. It is not an either / or; the ‘real world’ is not either out in academia or some other institution OR in our homes taking care of our loved ones. It is everywhere. We are always in it.

I am going to ask the professor when I meet with him next week if my years of homeschooling can count as teaching experience. It’s been almost twenty years now since I first homeschooled. How about one year of credit for ten years of homeschooling? If it cannot count as any experience at all, then I don’t think academics have much place to talk about feminism and the appropriation of women’s reproductive labor. But maybe it can count. As my friend says: try for everything, make others tell you no.

Works Cited

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarcerations in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012 (original 2010). 

Douglass citation in Alexander's book:

Douglass, Frederick. "What Negroes Want." The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Vol. 4. ed. Phillip S. Foner. New York: International, 1955. p 159-160

***

After Thoughts

Hours after posting this and then making dinner and then reading with Sean and Ryan (and pressuring them to help me make our list of shared texts more complete), I am thinking about what I wrote.  To be fair, teaching a college class is not the same as homeschooling. I don't grade my kids. More importantly, I don't have to put in the enormous amount of preparation before we read that college professors have to put in before teaching a class. I don't have stacks of essays to read, and extensive feedback to write, and I don't have to answer to anyone about what we do. 

I also know that we don't work within the same constraints that the high school did, where I worked one semester. And I know that at least some of the teachers cared tremendously about the students. One teacher who I talked with from time to time told me and my oldest son (who volunteered there three hours a week) that she often went home on the bus crying. Students who were refugees would write short essays that began like sunny, benign children's tales and ended with the author as a child going home to discover that the militia had murdered the rest of the whole family. She would begin to cry even in front of the students, and they would say, "It's okay, teacher. It has happened to a lot of people."  And I cannot really say that this teacher was ever cynical about her work, though she could be bitingly sarcastic about some of the doings of those in administrative positions. And I used to tutor a student there who loved history and wanted to be a lawyer. But she was struggling against such a multitude of obstacles. I had her write me essays, because I could tell she was falling through some kind of cracks in their system. But after a while, she stopped coming. I would email her to ask if she'd be coming, and she stopped answering. 

It is vital that in standing up for ourselves, we don't get sucked into the trap of seeing other laborers antagonistically. If we want our own labor honored, we have to honor the labor of others as well.  And yet if we do this too uncritically, pretty soon we all we can express is a useless, untrue claim that "It's all good."  

There are many ways to teach.  I can't say that homeschooling my kids for years means that I could just walk into a classroom and teach well. And teaching well is what is needed; students deserve that.  I am only saying that even if I have a lot to learn that can only be learned through particular experience, I know that teaching and learning with my kids (and sometimes other people's kids) has given me at least some feel for other kinds of teaching. And I know that if something goes wrong and I can't teach for an income, I'm still amazingly fortunate that I've been able to teach my kids for all these years and teach ESL and sometimes other things for short periods of time. Like all teachers, I will teach in the ways that I can. 

Living Unfreely But Comfortably? - Part One

by Lucy S.

I was particularly struck by something Edward Snowden said as I was listening to the interview in which he discusses his decision to come forward publicly about the U.S. government’s secret massive data collections of our emails, phone calls, and internet records. He said this:

You have to make a determination about what's important to you. And if living unfreely, but comfortably, is something you're willing to accept – and I think many of us are – it's the human nature – you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck - for relatively little work, against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But if you realize that that's the world that you helped create, and it's gonna get worse with the next generation, and the next generation, who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk, and it doesn't matter what the outcome is, so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/10/youre_being_watched_edward_snowden_emerges

I have been thinking about this a lot because he articulates the choices I have been trying to understand for years, ever since I began to realize that something far worse than I’d understood was going on in our political and economic system. And these realizations have only deepened over time, both from further study and from lived experiences.

At 29, Snowden had more than many of us will ever have – a high-paying (possibly interesting) job; a home; a partner with whom he apparently had a good relationship; a comfortable present and future, living in Hawaii. And so in one sense, that was the very specific comfort he was surrendering in exchange for the freedom to tell the truth about what he knew the government was doing, and to participate (in a larger way than most of us will ever find available to us) in determining the course of his society.

In his case, the choice became clear, so that it could be articulated in just that way: living unfreely but comfortably or bringing the attention of the world (the public) to the “architecture of oppression” which, in his position for a government subcontractor he was helping to create. Of course, that world was already being created before he was born, but the use of this technology to spy on and control everyone around the world is a particularly ominous leap toward greater oppression.

For most of us, our own choices feel far more mystified and muddled.  What great revelation could we come forward with?  We’re always battling this sense of systemic inevitability and personal weakness. And where is our big choice, anyway, even if we were willing to make it?

For those of us who read enough alternative news, Snowden’s information doesn’t feel that shocking. What hits me the hardest about this story is that finally – maybe – most people in the country will know about this, and the government will have to respond in some way. But what will that response be? So far, some of our Republican as well as Democrat political leaders want Snowden prosecuted.  At the same time, many of them claim to not know much about what goes on when these huge revelations come out.  Now, at least, they can’t say they don’t know. And many of us now know… something about it, at least. The more we know, the harder it becomes to live comfortably with business as usual (which is why many of our political leaders want to terrorize other would-be whistle-blowers by ruining the lives of those who make us confront grim truths). 

But it seems to me that the choice often feels like living unfreely and sort of comfortably OR living unfreely AND uncomfortably.  It is hard to figure out how we are to enact freedom of the kind Snowden is talking about – the freedom to actively participate in our society, to overtly oppose what we believe is wrong, and to do so without our government spying on us.  This is, or would be, the freedom to act as a full-fledged member of one’s society, to participate in public life.  But I notice a backlash in myself at times, a feeling that I am sick of knowing and thinking about all of these huge, horrible realities if I can’t change them.  It isn’t that I am trying to choose comfort, exactly.  What I grieve at times is the loss of what feels like my own nature, and thus, in some sense, my own freedom.

I am slowly reading My Ántonia by Willa Cather, and into the midst of this discussion, I want to interject a passage.  The protagonist is Jim, who at the time of this passage is about 13. Antonia, about 17, has moved from the farm into town to live with and work for a family next door to Jim and his grandparents.

There was a basic harmony between Ántonia and her mistress. They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. The loved children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. (End of chapter 6, book 2).

I do not mean to say that my nature is or was the same as theirs – and the me who is the student of literature and theory is flailing about inside of my mind, interrogating notions of individual nature as well as Snowden’s ‘human nature’ – but when I first read this passage, I felt a merged bodily and emotional memory stretch out toward whatever it stirs up in me. Maybe this is the wrong question, but how would Ántonia and her mistress respond to something like Edward Snowden’s revelations about their government?  It may be that the kind of people they were is so far removed from the realities of now that such a question is pointless. But the thing is that I don’t think WE are so far removed from their ‘natures.’  Don’t we still revel in these kinds of pleasures – these fused sensory and spiritual pleasures? These deeply satisfying comforts? Or at the least, don’t we ache for those times in our own lives when we did revel in them?

I am starting to believe that we cannot choose between living unfreely but comfortably and the implied opposite – living freely but uncomfortably.  I had come to think of comfort with a certain disdain, an idea of it as mental and physical laziness and spoiled hedonism.  But maybe this is wrong.  Don’t most of us yearn for comfort?  What is the alternative? Discomfort? Do we prolong situations in which we feel terribly uncomfortable?  Or, even when we put ourselves into uncomfortable situations, aren’t we aiming to ultimately expand the amount of this world in which we can feel at home? When I used to run (too long ago), I soon began to feel comfortable running. I got tired finally, yes, but I didn’t run feeling that I hated every second of it and couldn’t wait for it to be over. I did it enough until I loved the feeling. And when I began to get the most out of my more difficult theoretical studies was when I’d become comfortable enough to grasp the readings without having to think about each sentence for so long that the task was grueling. No one wants to just freeze a state of agony or even more muted misery. And why would we want to cultivate that kind of masochism?

And yet we live in a world in which we have got to figure out how we are going to respond to some horrific realities. They aren’t going to be wished away by us simply ignoring them and enjoying playing with kids and animals and losing ourselves in the music we love or digging in the dirt. So then, how do we merge our love for these well-lived-in joys with our need to drag the atrocities and betrayals out into the light to stand up to them?

I’m thinking that what Edward Snowden really chose was to reach out toward both freedom and comfort. I’m thinking that maybe he had become utterly uncomfortable with what he had to face at work – the continued realizations regarding our governments mass expansions of the “architecture of oppression.” 

And this can happen on multiple levels. If I discover that the food I’m eating is filled with additives that are making me or my kids or other loved ones sick, I am going to be uncomfortable eating it and will find comfort in another way of eating. If I realize (as Snowden himself found out) that the wars that are supposed to help combat oppression both in this country and in the places in which they are inflicted are actually used to expand and deepen oppression – that they devastate the people of those countries and the common soldiers sent to fight these wars – I will never find comfort in anything that extends or glorifies them.  And so on.

But we need to know how we ARE to live, then. What causes are worth standing up for? And how do we go about our day to day lives relishing the pleasures of body, mind, and emotion?  I was reading about these towns in Britain (and expanding into other places) which are called Transition Towns. And I see similar efforts of various names. People work in their neighborhoods to grow food, get to know one another, help each other take on problems in new ways. Food gardens are started in front yards and other open places. We stop waiting for the ‘right time’ and the ‘right place.’  We don’t wait to travel somewhere else where the people with the same exact political agendas congregate. This doesn’t mean we go into these efforts naively. This isn’t “all you need is love.” It’s joyous action.

Here is one experience we had in our neighborhood. Almost ten years ago, when we were doing work on this 1957 house we'd bought, our neighbor – the one with the Southern flag in his garage, the one who seemed so reactionary (and was in certain ways) – started coming over to help or lending his tools. When it was time to do the roof, he had a friend loan him a bunch of equipment to make it easier for us. Later, he was inspired to grow a garden when we were doing the same. His parents had grown food when he was a kid. He knew my convictions about never using weed-killer, but he continued using it. Then his own pumpkin and strawberry plants were killed by it.  I laughed at him and lightly mocked him with a “What did I tell you??!!” spiel.  (He and I had that kind of relationship.) We both taught each other things. He ended up being a great neighbor, and we were all changed by knowing each other. (He moved up north, and we still miss him.)

Here is one more experience I had when I visited my friend, Erika, two years ago. We went for walks every day in her Missouri neighborhood. One morning, we passed a couple of teenagers walking a pit bull puppy. I will confess that I'm very afraid of pit bulls. This puppy was too young to worry me, but I immediately thought to myself: "Great - so now when I visit Erika in the future, there will be this pit bull in the neighborhood."  Erika walked up to these teens, and she said so warmly (and she is one of the warmest people I know), "Oh, he's adorable. Is it a he or a she?"  The boy walking him seemed surprised in a good way. He smiled and began talking more about the dog.  The other boy also smiled. After we walked away, I told her that I had felt kind of irritated and anxious when I saw them coming toward us with that dog. She said she's scared of pit bulls, too, but she figures she'd better try to make friends with this dog now if it's going to be in the neighborhood. And she said she knows those boys are probably uncomfortable with most adults in the neighborhood because most of them dislike those boys and make it obvious. She said she wanted to try to change that. 

I like the idea of calling ourselves Transition neighborhoods and towns (and maybe workplaces and school campuses and anywhere that we can start enacting transition and transformation to a far better way of life) because this carries with it the sense of being on the move. Maybe we can create a deeper kind of comfort, one that doesn’t require so much underlying or overt discomfort. Can we live freely and comfortably?

Acceptance Versus Resignation

 by Lucy S. 

I woke up this morning thinking about the difference between resignation and acceptance.  What constitutes defeatism or resignation and what constitutes wise acceptance – knowing our limits and the limits of others?  It seems to me that so many times something in this society urges us to resign ourselves to what we should never accept while spurring us on to battle the wrong things. 

I’ve recently begun asking some of the people in my very large extended family if they will each pitch in $20 to help get Nicole, the daughter of one of my cousins, into a place to live.  She didn’t ask me to do this, and the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it will just be another of my misguided efforts that ends in failure.  I don’t believe the problem is that Nicole is just too messed up (as one of my aunts said), but that she needs more sustained material and emotional help than I can manage to provide from this distance. She lives in California and I am 2,000 plus miles away.

Nicole’s youngest two kids (around ages 6 and 8) were put into foster care by social services some months back because her partner (the father of the kids) was using meth. I don’t know the whole story of how it happened that the kids were taken. Nicole left him at that time and has since been sleeping on her cousin’s couch. 

It’s been two months since Nicole said the judge gave her an extra six months to get a place in order to get her kids back. I asked if he means to sever her custody of her kids if she doesn’t get a place in six months. She said yes. I wrote about this.  http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/04/welfare-part-2.html  I then told her about my idea of asking others in the family to pitch in. The last thing I wanted was to humiliate her.  I said that I think this is what all of us should do for one another and that I would like to think that if anyone else in our extended family was at risk for losing their kids because of not having a place, others would help. I asked how much she needed. She said $500 would make a big difference.  Will this be enough? Will Nicole be able to pay the rent every month if she gets a place?

I delayed taking up the collection because I was in school. But the semester is over. There is still more garden work to be done here, but if I am going to make this push to collect this money for Nicole, I have to get on with it. I’m asking for small amounts because I know that many of them spend $20 or more just going out to eat. Maybe if the amount is small, they won’t feel entitled to demand a report on Nicole’s whole life and they won’t feel that I need to prove that their small donation will utterly transform her. Maybe I won’t have to prove that she of all possible needy people is worth it.

I begin with my dad. I explain, and he is all for it. I even get an email from my mom saying that they are each sending $20.  I ask him to ask my brother. I know that it’s easy for me to say that it’s only $20, but many people know others who might likewise need help badly.  But I am asking people who in some way know Nicole. I am asking her family.

The point has been made that reliance on notions of fidelity to family is quite conservative. Well, I am all for the government providing some help here, but so far, they don’t seem to have much to offer Nicole and her kids, other than the permanent termination of their relationships with one another. I am also up for any huge reforms or revolutionary changes that would allow us all to be able to count on decent places to live and work that matters and time to care for ourselves, our kids, and everyone else. But in the meantime, our lives are going by. If Nicole and her kids don’t matter as specific, particular people, why does anyone else?  Doesn’t each person have to matter? 

So, between me and my parents, we are up to $60. Only $440 more to go.  I call my Aunt Valerie, who I haven’t talked with since my uncle (her brother; my dad’s identical twin) died in late 2011. We didn’t have much chance to talk around the time of the funeral.  I am not only calling her for fundraising purposes.  I’ve gone and visited her in the past, and I’ve called.

But she’s been living with my fairly affluent great-aunt and great-uncle (my grandfather’s brother) for about five years, taking care of them, and she hasn’t had much time. They never had children. They will leave her their paid-for, rather expensive home in Santa Maria when they die. And earlier this year, Gordon did die. Now only Fay, in her mid-90s, remains. I’ve never liked Fay, and my feelings haven’t changed just because she’s really old now.  When my kids were little, the year after I’d returned from Germany, she used to tell me at various family functions that I should leave “the kids” with my spouse (my kids as well as Valerie’s) and go with Valerie to visit them.  Long ago, Fay decided she could no longer bear having children in her home. They might scratch the lacquer on her collections or in some other way damage her treasures.  She also would have greatly preferred not having anyone in their town but white people, but that she has had to bear. Fay would get angry if people didn’t visit them.  The inheritance was dangled out as a disgusting bribery. Not for my generation, but for my dad and his siblings. Because my dad’s twin didn’t ever drive up to visit them (swamped as he was by work and caring for so many), she began over a decade ago telling others in the family that she might remove him from the will. He told me he’d probably die before them anyway, and he was sadly right.  I’d never make the mistake of asking Fay to donate anything for Nicole, though Fay can blow through large sums pretty quickly for trinkets that catch her eye.  Fay stopped working when she and Gordon married in the 1940s. She says her job was to “manage [their] money.”

Valerie and I catch up during our phone call. Then I bring up Nicole, but I don’t ask for money.  I tell Valerie that Nicole might lose her kids permanently if she doesn’t get a place. Valerie says that would probably be the best thing for them all. She says Nicole can’t handle those kids, that some years ago, Valerie stopped by and the kids were running through the apartment, even banging their heads against the walls. They’re autistic, she tells me, and I know; Nicole has posted things about ‘autistic awareness’ and how proud she is of her kids and their efforts in school in connection with this. Valerie tells me that they just thrashed the carpet in the apartment with their juice stains everywhere. I flash back in my mind to Valerie’s two-year-old walking over a light-color area rug my grandmother bought, cup of soda in hand as it sloshed over the edges. 

I tell Valerie that the kids were removed because of Nicole’s husband’s meth use, and Valerie tells me that he’s her boyfriend, not her husband. She says that Nicole does drugs, too, that Nicole freely admitted that she smoked pot during Valerie’s visit years ago. And “she bragged about having gay friends.”  I don’t bother to respond to this. I do know that Nicole used to smoke weed sometimes; she said it helped with the post-traumatic stress. That ended, however, because social services tests her for all drugs as a condition to her getting her kids back.

The sound of two-liter bottles of soda opening several times a day comes to me – the soda Valerie’s kids consumed for any thirst during their childhood. And there were the masses of junk food in their home and continual fast-food and restaurant meals. Her older son weighed over 400 pounds by the time he was 18; her younger son was closer to 300 pounds. Which substances are more harmful? Which addictions are okay?

I think of the complaints from others in the family for years that her kids were so wild.  But Valerie was also good with her kids and with my grandmother; she would take them all on camping trips and attempt various adventures.  And she’d left her violently abusive husband. People do the best they can, I thought. She was trying.  Can’t she remember her own struggles?

On the phone, Valerie tells me that the one she feels sorry for is Zach. Zachary is Nicole’s other son, her 13 year old who she lost custody of long ago. When Nicole was 15, she was raped. Her mother, my cousin Chris, was furious at Nicole for going across the street to talk with the kids when Chris had told her to stay in the house after school until Chris got home. It was a friend or acquaintance of theirs. I only know he was older (over 18 according to the family story as it made its way along), and that Chris wanted no further dealings with him or those neighbors at all – no charges pressed, nothing said. But Nicole got pregnant, and they moved. I remember that Chris was angry at Nicole for ‘dressing the wrong way’ and ‘acting the wrong way.’ Nicole had her baby; Chris later couldn’t handle them and they moved to another state to live with Chris’s sister. Then Chris remarried and decided she wanted that grandson to raise. She began to talk with Nicole again (who was desperate for a relationship with her mother), and she asked Nicole to sign over custody. Nicole did. Ultimately, this didn’t work out. He now lives in foster care. I am not sure why Zach is “the one” who Valerie feels sorry for, but he certainly deserves sympathy, this kid who has been yanked all over, unable to count on an ongoing primary caregiver. Is there enough sympathy for Nicole, too?  Are we rationing it?  Ten years from now, after this broken childhood, will Zach no longer deserve sympathy because he will be ‘an adult’? Will we then all rant and rave about how he does have choices, after all?

Nicole and I started communicating because she sent me a message one night that simply said, “why won’t my mom talk to me?” Neither her mother nor her father will speak to her. They were both violent toward each other when they were married, and violent toward her. Nicole posted a photo of her mom dancing in their place back in the 1996 and wrote fondly of her mom ‘getting down back in the day.’

Valerie tells me that it’s sad but there’s just no solution. She says that they’ve all got “the bipolar.” She says that Chris has it, and her dad has it (my other aunt’s ex – another violent spouse-beater). And Nicole has it, and so do Nicole’s kids.  I hate listening to this pop-psychiatric babble from people – their summations of themselves and others based on the experts’ latest diagnoses, all of which happen to also rake in profit for those experts and the pharmaceutical industry whose drugs they dole out. Nicole was on Ritalin during some of her childhood and teens, back when she “had ADHD.”  The experts used to believe in eugenics, too, and racism and colonialism and the inferiority of women.

***

My own ethics are torn as I think about and try to write about this.  Am I casting Nicole as a victim? Am I trying to be a rescuer?  (I am always somewhat unclear about these labels and their implications beyond current pop-psychology circular reasoning.)  Am I casting Chris or Nicole’s father or Valerie as villains? (Or Fay? Yes, I think so, with Fay.)  Am I self-righteous about this? Is this a displacement of working for larger systemic change or of solving my own problems?  Is Nicole ‘deserving’ enough of this help?

It would have been far easier to just let this go by while silently ‘wishing’ Nicole and her kids ‘the best.’ I don’t know if that would constitute wise acceptance, but for me, it feels more like defeatism, resignation, and not holding myself accountable to do what I can when I recognize a need that I might be able to help meet. It feels like resigning myself to destruction.

Alain Badiou, in his book Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2002), says there is only a particular ethics and that it connects to a particular person maintaining fidelity to what he calls “the event,” that which “compels us to decide a new way of being” (41).  The process of truth comes from the decision to be “faithful to an event … by thinking … the situation ‘according to’ the event” (41). This is fidelity for Badiou. This kind of truth is an “immanent break … because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else” (42-43). In contrast, an abstract, general ethics (legalism, moralism), what he calls the “reign of ethics” is a “symptom of a universe ruled by … resignation in the face of necessity together with a purely negative, if not destructive, will.” This is nihilism (30). We “tear ourselves away from nihilism” by “affirming truths against the desire for nothingness” and through “the possibility of the impossible … every loving encounter, every scientific re-foundation, every artistic invention and every sequence of emancipatory politics” (39).

For Badiou, a particular ethics bound to the truths discovered in ‘the event' means we will be “faithful to [the] situation”; being faithful would mean “to treat it right to the limit of the possible” (15). He gives the example of a doctor presented with a patient who has no medical insurance. A general ‘ethics’ might mean refusing treatment under the cloak of bureaucratic rules. But the ethics of the particular will mean doing all that is possible.  There are limits, but those limits are real, not manufactured in resignations regarding other people’s lives.

I am trying to understand how this applies right now in this particular situation at hand. When Valerie left her violent spouse, she had immediate help. Her mother as well as her brother welcomed her into their homes, not once, but over and over, even after she’d returned to him and then fled again. And finally, something changed. She didn’t go back. My grandmother (her mom) took her in while she waited for a low-income apartment that was only months rather than years in coming (as it is now).  Should this be Valerie’s ‘event’ – this second chance she had to rebuild her life and the lives of her kids?  I have wondered what my ‘event’ is, and I am not sure. It seems to be every relationship in which people care enough to accept me as I am, and we form a relationship that I can truly count on.  As my lifelong friend Gloria says, we all need to be loved and to love others. And that love can’t just be silently felt; it has to be manifested in particular words and actions to particular people. 

Doesn’t acceptance in the best sense mean accepting people with their flaws and still caring for them and loving them? 

***

So there is no solution in Valerie’s opinion. What are we to do with them all? Wait for them to live out their sad lives? Put them all to sleep forever as kindly as possible? What does it mean to decide there is no solution?

I decide not to ask Valerie for $20 or tell her about my efforts for this situation.

Nicole doesn’t know that there is no solution to or for her and her kids. She is working, trying to find out how to become a pastry chef, trying to get her kids back, posting positive thinking messages each day on her Facebook status that pain me at times to read. She writes: “I am blessed!” She writes that she knows she is beautiful and that she’s on an awesome journey and is grateful because whatever she has gone through has made her stronger. She writes me to say that me going back to school has “inspired” her.

It seems to me that there are so many solutions for Nicole and her kids. Having what she needs and being able to count on that seem pretty crucial. Why are she and her kids not allowed that? And why is this lack considered their own fault rather than the system’s?

Hope Lives Low Down on the Ground

by Lucy S. 

Last fall, in our class on writings of resistance in this age of globalization, we read Arundhati Roy’s beautifully angry book of love, Walking with the Comrades. This is her account of her weeks with the guerillas in the forests of the southern Indian state of Orissa. Her opening to her first chapter explains better than my paraphrasing will do here.

The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain. For the Kondh it’s as though god has been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ (1).

Roy explains that their hills have been sold to Vedanta, “one of the biggest mining corporations in the world, … owned by Anil Agarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran. Vedanta is only one of many multinational corporations closing in on Orissa” (2). These corporations are after the minerals in the ground, and to get to them, these companies remove the forests and rip open the ground. Their extractions leave deep gashes over huge expanses of land, pouring pollutants into the water, land, and air. Here is a link to a short article from 2011 stating that the Indian government had revoked permission to mine in this part of Orissa. (Another article of the same month and year tells of mining permits granted by the government for twenty more years in Orrissa.) Look to see what these forests are like before the mining companies do their business on them.   http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/no-green-nod-for-mining-in-niyamgiri-forests/article2153398.ece 

Here is a photo of what previously forested land in Orissa looks like after mining companies occupy it. http://www.silicongeoscience.com/Orissa.htm  The photo is helpfully provided by a company called Silicon Geoscience in their short beckoning to other companies to come and enjoy the rape of Orissa. Their prose drools over the “unmatched bounty of mineral wealth” there for the taking, minerals which they then list one by one to wet the appetites of the profit-chasers. Orissa “enjoys a lion share in the country and the World” of these minerals; why should she keep her treasures tucked away inside of her warm earth?  Her ground must be mechanically ripped open so the goods can be gotten.  And it will be so easy, according to Silicon Geoscience. “A complimentary infrastructure, strategic location, availability of high resolution airborne geophysical data over the mineralised terrain and an investor friendly Government make Orissa the hottest destination for the investors in the mines and mineral sector.”  According to Silicon Geoscience, Orissa’s ground is defenseless, sold out and mapped for maximum exploitation of her resources until she is emptied and used up. Other multinational companies who are already in on the action are named; do you want to miss out?  No worries about getting into trouble – the company promises this: “We will shoulder your responsibility while you are here.”

Roy writes:

If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will be destroyed too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India whose home is similarly under attack (2).

Who is the “we” who will “shoulder” the “responsibility” for this? What does it mean to “shoulder” this “responsibility”?  Like the ground of Orissa and anywhere else on earth where companies like Silicon Geoscience can plunge in their instruments of extraction, the word ‘responsibility’ is emptied of its innards here. The people who sell their lives to in turn sell out the world have taken a word which carries inside it the capacity to respond reasonably, to be personally accountable for what is done and hollowed it out, to then be filled by its exact opposite. What they mean is that they promise to help you decimate the land and people living there while never having to be responsible for the carnage. And how could they mean anything else? How strong are the ‘shoulders’ of this paper company? Can the specific people who stand under their paperwork cloak resurrect the forests and creatures (human and otherwise) which their mining will murder?

But these forested hills of Orissa are not defenseless and the destruction is not inevitable. Many who live there are fighting with all they have to protect their land and their ability to continue abiding there. Some are the ‘Maoist’ guerrillas. Who are these ‘Maoist’ guerillas of the forests?

Right now in central India, the Maoists’ guerilla army is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after sixty years of India’s so-called Independence, have not had access to education, health care, or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to  a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadre who have lived and worked and fought by their side for decades (Roy 7).

As have so many indigenous people, they are fighting against their own annihilation. They fight to live, not only individually, but as a collective entity inextricably bound together – people, land, all that live in and on that ground., The Indian government wages war on them. Arundhati Roy arranged to join them for a short time to better understand their struggles and write about them. She too thus became part of the defense of this land and its inhabitants.

Rather than engage in a simplistic chase for the answer to the ‘are they good or bad’ question, Roy labors to discover and live a bit of their story and tell a part of it to the world.  In doing so, her goal is not to ‘advocate’ for the forest guerillas of Orissa and motivate all of her readers of this book to likewise feel sorry for them and perhaps sign a petition. Rather, her labor here is to ultimately ask: what can they teach us?

Near the end, she writes:

Can we expect that an alternative to what looks like certain death for the planet will come from the imagination that has brought about this crisis in the first place? It seems unlikely. The alternative, if there is one, will emerge from the places and the people who have resisted the hegemonic impulse of capitalism and imperialism instead of being co-opted by it (212).

And Roy writes of the hope in India, the “most spectacular coalition of resistance movements, with their experience, understanding and vision” (213). Will this hope bear enough fruit and spread its seeds in time?  And what is the nature of this hope? Roy says:

If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them (213-214).

How do we get low enough onto the ground for hope to put its arms around us? What of those of us who do live in cities with tall buildings?  How do we learn to remember that the forests, mountains and rivers – yes, and deserts, prairies, valleys, lakes, and oceans – all protect us? How do we go to battle every day for them?

Planting all the food plants we can where we live (food for us humans or the multitude of living beings who live some or all of their lives near this small spot on earth) moves us closer to the ground. This is not ‘the answer.' It is a place where we can physically locate ourselves, a place in which hope can better encircle us. We can learn more of what this ground and all that grows in it has to teach us if we let ourselves love those who live in and on it. To do this, rather than conquer, we protect. Rather than ripping the ground open to extract minerals to make weapons (as Roy notes is the main goal igniting the lust for bauxite to make aluminum), we plant seeds to nourish, seeds in the ground and seeds in ourselves and others.

My friend Delaine wrote of our shared thirst in her beautiful April contribution here. Her writing feels to me like a reach outward, exploring the question of how to begin to respond adequately to the revelations of a student in pain. (Unlike the Silicon Geoscience company, she still knows the meaning of the word ‘responsibility.’) Delaine writes of feeling each other’s pain “so personally that we cry,” and, with an increasing urgent ache to respond well to this other person’s pain, she asks, “What about a hug? Will a hug help?”   http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/04/conversation-on-friday-delaine-w.html

My friend Ahna often signs her emails to me with “Abrazos,” and I have increasingly enfolded this in my own words because I love this. Hugs, embraces, abrazos.  Ahna lives near the ground on her small farm. She fights to keep poisons away. She always greets us with such affection.

My friends Sue, John, Becky, Darwin, and Bree graced our home for a few days at the end of May.Their entire visit was for me a holistic embrace of life and one another. Sue and John live partly in the ground in an earthship home they built in Vermont. They live in an intentional community in Vermont, two hundred acres of forest, meadow, and pond where a myriad of creatures live. A small number of those creatures are human. Some of them grow food there. Becky, Sue’s daughter, lives on the other side of the country in California with her two daughters and partner. They grow so much food on their two acres that they feed themselves and others.  Sue is always ready to physically embrace those around her. She is always looking for ways to bring us together in the hopeful labor for a better world. She plants and nourishes seeds of hope in us all – those of us fortunate enough to know her.

My friend Dan wrote recently of his pleasure working with his father in the garden during his visit home. And he wrote that imagining our endeavors as a process rather than an end product might be better – that thinking about how we want to live our day-to-day life can provide insight in making decisions. I am thinking about this. Dan gives me hope in his merging of steadiness and passion, and this, too – this is what it is to live low down on the ground, where life bursts forth from the good dirt.

Ryan and Justin, my youngest and oldest sons, are outside giving a bit of water to the newly growing vegetables.  

Gardening; preparing food; caring for humans young, old, or in-between; writing; reading; teaching; building homes – all of these are humble, steady, down-to-earth, life-loving acts. 

Are they enough? Is anything enough?  In “Confronting Empire,” Arundhati Roy writes:

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/AR012703.html.

These rooted, fecund stories sprout from those living low in and on the ground.

Abrazos de esperanza y la esperanza de abrazos.

What is Education for Liberation and Who is Included?

 by Lucy S.

When I was an undergraduate at my huge public land-grant university, we would read about and discuss how people were marginalized in various ways; how education is both doled out differently and experienced differently based on class, ethnicity, gender, and other differences; that people of color and poorer people (of any ethnicity) are statistically imprisoned at higher rates for similar crimes than whites and/or the more affluent; how levels of literacy vary and what effect that has on someone’s whole life; how the cultures of the working-classes and poverty-classes are degraded and devalued; how oppression plays out for girls and women; the damages done and still being inflicted by colonization and imperialism; and how material realities are the foundation for so much of our potentials and choices. That is a long-winded list, and still, there was so much more connected to what I am now going to talk about. My point is that we were intellectually confronted with these issues, and what was strange for me was the feeling that we were always talking ‘about’ people who were in so many ways kept out of that institution.

During my first round there, when my niece Rose was still alive (I’ve written about her in other blog pieces here), I’d be talking with her on my cellphone while traveling to campus, because I often felt like that traveling time was the only time I had to get into phone conversations. I was swamped with school work and other responsibilities. So we’d be talking, and she’d talk, for example, about the mice running everywhere in her dad’s mobile home (because of holes in the subfloor or a door that wouldn’t shut all the say), how they’d run over her and Anthony (her baby) when they tried to sleep; or how she was trying to get beyond her meth addiction but friends in the mobile home park were knocking on the windows and doors saying they knew she was in there and to come out and party; or how proud she felt of finally getting a job but later how the wife in that Subway franchise owner-couple said the husband was talking to Rose too much and started taking her off the schedule. Then we’d hang up as I entered the building and made my way upstairs to my – by comparison – clean, serene, organized class. The contrast was usually jarring for me.  The combination of that contrast and our discussions of readings about people in situations similar to those of people I love or sometimes my own life (past or present – the many moves, the economic instability, the ways in which work so often thought of as ‘women’s work’ is devalued, being kept out of educational endeavors because of larger systemic issues) struck me as surreal and at times psychologically overwhelming. It deeply pained me in ways that I struggled to articulate.  

The question-combo that often came to mind, which I later voiced, was: “Why are they out there and we’re in here talking about them? Why aren’t they in here?”  Much more needed to be said to explain why this was problematic, but my mind felt thick the way a tongue can feel when we physically can’t form our words well. I knew these exclusions were wrong, but my mind felt too swollen with hurt and worry and hazy anger to methodically try to explain.

Sometimes I think that a major reason for continuing my education has been to build walls of words and theory and closely-read stories around those feelings so that I could explain to others how I felt and why these exclusions are so immoral and devastating to those who are kept out.  

After I returned, these were some of the early questions and ideas that formed. Why did academics and college students (or the political policymakers) get to come together and theorize about these other people?  Who were they to try to decide what to ‘do’ about the working-classes and poor? What would happen if this were turned upside down?  What if the working-classes, poverty-classes, and colonized came together with our readings to discuss what to ‘do’ about those humans damaged by having too much power and privilege? What theories would we explore and build upon as we confronted absences in empathy, intelligence, insight, ethics, self-discipline, and sanity in the ruling classes? What psychological and sociological knowledge bases would help us determine how to treat their personality disorders which resulted in spoiled, self-indulgent, greedy destructiveness?  What would we do about their impoverished value systems that were products of their class-interests – and thus of the system’s structure? Could they be educated out of their deep ignorance and their sense of entitlement to dominate others’ lives and exploit other people’s labor so egregiously?

I discovered others in academia who had long been working to turn the tables this way, to reframe the parameters of these analyses. The radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is one of the best known; he repeatedly contrasted education for domestication with education for liberation. It’s easy to toss these phrases around in sloganeering fashion, but it is much harder to grasp what they mean or to work out for ourselves what they mean as we try to live them. What we do know is that it surely consists of something very different than just turning the poor, working-classes, and colonized into the upper classes and world dominators. Doing this to individuals does not liberate them; it only changes their position in the systemic prison. It positions them more as dominators rather than dominated, and there is no liberation in those roles. And doing this collectively is impossible; there would be no serving class to exploit and rule. But the culture and value systems of the ruling classes are built on their distorted relationships with others – their normalized exploitations and dominations.

But still, this is too abstract. What IS education for liberation – collective liberation – the only kind of genuine liberation there can be?

The upper classes comfort themselves by clinging to the lie which insists that the poor, working-classes, and colonized did and do suffer mostly because of their own deficiencies. It’s not surprising that they tell themselves this to fend off a guilty awareness of themselves as the ‘bad guys’ wreaking havoc on most people’s lives and on our shared planet. What makes them successful and what hurts the rest of us so much is when we believe them. Believing them can and does manifest as shame about ourselves and those close to us, or a pseudo-defiance that can sometimes be self-destructive. Believing them can make us look down on each other and compete to be more like the ruling class (economically and culturally). My friend Kerry is hopeful that we can figure out how to get beyond our petty divisions. When I saw her recently, she reminded me of a basic truth: “There’s more of us than there are of them!!”   

I would like to hear more about what others think of when they think of liberation – and education for liberation. What does this mean to you?

This morning, I was reading Aurora Levins Morales’s blog (which is linked to on the side of my blog), and this struck me:

I am the descendant of Taíno people whose tropical ecosystem allowed them to put in minimal work and reap abundant crops of carbohydrates, who could spend a modest amount of hours fishing and gathering shellfish, and have plenty of time to develop sophisticated art forms and elaborate rituals.  Their culture honored artists and trees, created breathtaking carvings in wood and shell, invented hammocks knotted from the fiber of maguey, polished rings of stone, ceramic pots and figures elaborately worked with earthen dyes, and days long festivals of poetry and song.  

Europeans arrived and decimated the Taino people on the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). They enslaved the Tainos, forcing them to work. (Bartolome de las Casas, a priest in Hispaniola at the time of these atrocities, wrote extensively about the extreme violence inflicted on the indigenous people by the colonizers. http://www.lascasas.org/ )

Would education for liberation result in lives more like the Tainos lived when they were not violently enslaved by the colonizers?